CAF Advisory Board member Professor Alice Sullivan is among twelve academics whose academic freedom has previously been infringed and who have written to the skills minister, Baroness Jacqui Smith, urging the Government to bring the promised Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 (HEFSA) complaints scheme into force without further delay.
The scheme matters because, as CAF and other free speech campaigners have long pointed out, HEFSA was enacted on the assumption that an Office for Students complaints mechanism – created under Section 8 of the Act – would provide a practical enforcement route. Without it, academics have no straightforward way to ask the regulator to investigate alleged breaches of free speech duties. Judicial review is a remedy of last resort – tightly constrained and prohibitively expensive – while employment tribunals have no jurisdiction to enforce HEFSA duties and are already under significant strain.
Speaking in the House of Lords last week, Baroness Smith raised hopes that movement might now be on the horizon. Responding to criticisms of the delay, she said that “we are making progress with this” and that she “expect[ed] us to be able to introduce the amended complaints scheme sooner rather than later”. Previously, ministers had spoken only of the Government “considering options”. Earlier this week, during Topical Questions, the Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, echoed that language in the Commons. Asked about setting a clear timetable, she replied: “We intend to do so shortly.”
The difficulty is that ministers have also repeatedly said the scheme will be enacted once a “suitable legislative vehicle” is found. As CAF has previously reported, there is nothing currently scheduled in the forthcoming parliamentary session that appears likely to carry the necessary amendments. On present timetables, then, the relevant legislation might not receive Royal Assent until 2028–29, with implementation potentially taking several years beyond that.
The academics’ letter, however, points to a possible alternative route, with its signatories arguing that ministers do not in fact need to wait for further primary legislation before establishing the investigatory mechanism. Instead, they say the Secretary of State could commence the relevant provisions of HEFSA by statutory instrument for higher education providers, leaving aside the paragraphs relating to students’ unions if those duties are to be repealed.
This interpretation tallies with advice reportedly given to Lord Young of Acton by a senior parliamentary official in response to a query to the House of Lords Library, indicating that the Government “could, via secondary legislation, partially commence Section 8” and that “there is no constitutional reason why this has to be done by primary legislation”.
Whether this possibility is now under active consideration – and whether it might explain the shift in ministerial tone – remains unclear. Hopefully, as Baroness Smith might put it, we will find out “sooner rather than later”.
Among the signatories to the letter are Professor Alice Sullivan (UCL), whose invited talk for NatCen Social Research was cancelled in May 2020 after objections from Stonewall to her view that biological sex should not be conflated with gender identity in population-level statistics; Professor Jo Phoenix (University of Reading), who won an Employment Tribunal judgment in 2024 finding discrimination and harassment at her then employer, the Open University, linked to her gender-critical beliefs; and Professor Selina Todd (University of Oxford), who was “no-platformed” from the Oxford International Women’s Festival at Exeter College in March 2020 after objections to her association with the campaign group Women’s Place UK, which advocates for the protection of women’s single-sex spaces – a position that trans activists characterise as “transphobic”.
The letter also explains why the issue matters so urgently. Cases such as theirs, it argues, “represent the tip of the iceberg, since most of the academics affected by these issues avoid public attention. Indeed, most quite rationally avoid raising complaints even internally within their institutions, both because they assume this will be fruitless and because they fear potential personal consequences.”
CAF has recently written in The Critic (here) about why the HEFSA complaints scheme matters so much for academic freedom, and why the absence of a practical enforcement route risks leaving the Act’s new duties largely symbolic.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.