The Bishop of Newcastle spoke in a debate on the government record on Education, Employment and Welfare on 16th July 2026:
The Lord Bishop of Newcastle: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, for bringing this debate today, and it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley.
I want to focus my comments on opportunity and social mobility. In assessing the Government’s record on education, employment and welfare since July 2024, we cannot ignore the growing loss of humanities provision across higher education. Universities are autonomous institutions, but their decisions are shaped by the wider financial and policy environment.
A successful education system is measured not simply by qualifications or apprenticeships but by the breadth of opportunity it offers. The Social Mobility Commission’s State of the Nation 2024 reminds us that opportunity remains profoundly shaped by geography. When courses disappear from universities across whole regions, it is often students without the financial means to relocate who lose more opportunities first. Those from more affluent backgrounds can frequently move elsewhere or absorb the additional costs of studying further from home; those from less advantaged backgrounds often cannot. As a result, talent is constrained not by ability but by circumstance.
Social mobility depends not only on opening doors but on ensuring that those doors exist in every part of the country. If whole disciplines become concentrated in a handful of institutions or regions, educational choice increasingly becomes a privilege rather than a right. That risks reinforcing existing inequalities and undermining the Government’s stated ambition to widen opportunity and spread growth beyond our major cities.
On employment, these cuts affect lecturers, researchers, librarians and professional staff, whose expertise underpins teaching, innovation and the wider economy. Humanities graduates go on to become teachers, civil servants, diplomats, lawyers, journalists and leaders in our creative industries. They also develop the critical thinking, and communication and analytical skills, that employers consistently value across many sectors. Weakening that pipeline weakens the nation.
These concerns have been brought home to me through a friend and colleague at the University of Exeter, who has described the uncertainty surrounding proposed reductions in humanities posts. Sadly, Exeter is not alone. Similar pressures are being felt across the sector, with consequences for staff, students and local communities alike.
If we are serious about improving social mobility, we cannot allow educational opportunity to become narrower or more geographically uneven. A country that values aspiration must ensure that students, wherever they live and whatever their background, continue to have full access to the breadth of higher education. Social mobility is not simply about helping individuals to succeed; it is about ensuring that every community can retain and develop its talent, and that no young person’s ambitions are limited by where they happen to grow up.
I therefore ask the Minister: what steps will the Government take to ensure that our universities remain financially sustainable, that students continue to enjoy a broad range of subjects, and that the vital contribution of the humanities to our economy, our public services and our national life is not lost?
The Church of England in Parliament 
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