Lucy Powell has been appointed Secretary of State for Education in Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s new Cabinet, succeeding Bridget Phillipson.
A former Shadow Education Secretary (2015–16) and member of the Commons Education Committee (2017–20), Powell brings to the role a consistent record of pressing for wider and more equitable access to higher education. She has also shown a welcome willingness to question the marketisation and consumerisation of the university sector – a perspective that feels increasingly timely as an instrumental and narrowly economistic conception of higher education drives cuts to disciplines, particularly in the humanities, whose contribution cannot readily be measured in financial terms.
Her parliamentary record on academic freedom and campus free speech is, however, considerably more limited. What evidence there is presents a mixed picture.
Powell supported Labour’s unsuccessful attempt to deny the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill a Second Reading in July 2021. During its subsequent passage through Parliament, however, she voted for a Labour-backed amendment that would have broadened the statutory definition of academic freedom to encompass research, intellectual inquiry, participation in public debate and criticism of institutions.
She also supported Labour’s new clause 4, designed to safeguard the independence of the Office for Students’ Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom. This would have prevented the appointment of recent political donors and introduced independent and parliamentary scrutiny into the appointment process.
Although these were whipped votes rather than personal speeches, they nevertheless suggest that Powell did not oppose statutory protection for academic freedom as a matter of principle, even if she objected to the Conservative government’s particular legislative scheme.
One of the newly elected Labour government’s earliest and most consequential higher-education decisions came in July 2024, when Phillipson controversially paused commencement of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Responding to Conservative criticism of the constitutionally unusual decision to suspend implementation of legislation already enacted by Parliament, Powell declared in the Commons that the government wanted to end the “culture wars” that had been waged against Britain’s “fantastic universities”.
But as CAF’s casework with academics and students across the sector attests, viewing the problem primarily through a culture-war lens risks overlooking the real, quietly technocratic and frequently non-partisan institutional machinery by which lawful speech is restricted.
Vague policies that misstate the law, politicised complaints, overbroad harassment procedures, anonymous reporting portals, departmental cultures that stigmatise heterodox thinkers and protracted disciplinary processes can be – and have been – used against Marxists as well as Conservatives, pro-Israel as well as pro-Palestinian academics and students, and advocates as well as critics of various contested institutional orthodoxies.
Powell’s parliamentary record leaves substantial questions unanswered. Despite making the case for a university sector more open to first-generation students, young people from low-participation communities and working-class pupils too often shut out of the most selective institutions, questioning the effects of marketisation on the academy, and voting for some valuable academic-freedom protections, she has not yet indicated how – or even whether – she understands the practical, on-the-ground threats to freedom of speech within universities.
From 1 September, she will become the first Education Secretary to oversee the new Office for Students free-speech complaints scheme, giving academics and visiting speakers a direct statutory route through which to challenge alleged breaches of their rights. The complaints brought under the scheme should offer an invaluable window – for the Education Secretary as much as for the OfS – onto the realities of campus free speech and the extent to which the problems requiring attention reach far beyond the familiar politics of Left and Right.
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.