Running Their Own Affairs?

The "Times Higher Education Supplement" of 9 February 2006 briefly reported that the Privy Council, tasked with approving the statutes of universities, was now going to leave their internal arrangements in their own hands. These underlying policy directions need to be set in the context of the important change of emphasis from "audit" to "risk management", encouraged by the Higher Education Funding Councils which are the statutory bodies entrusted with the disbursement of public funding to higher education institutions. It remains a statutory requirement that a university have its accounts audited to a publicly approved standard, in accordance with the Statement of Recommended Practice: Accounting for Further and Higher Education. The proposed changes to Privy Council oversight have been put together on the basis of a study of the needs of chartered universities, with another for statutory corporations to follow, but there is no indication of comparable research into the needs of Oxford and Cambridge. These two universities still operate under the provisions of the Oxford and Cambridge Act 1923, which have always given them a considerable liberty to create their own domestic legislation. The proposed lifting of the requirements for Privy Council supervision in other kinds of university is likely to stimulate consideration of the present provisions in both the ancient universities, because they too are affected by the policy directives to improve efficiency (lighter bureaucracy), and to see trouble coming and deal with it before it leads to waste of money and resources (risk management).