 Well, thank you very much for inviting me. It's my first time at one of your conferences and just in case you haven't come across, I hope your libraries are stocked full of our publications, but they may not be because we do produce everything in hard copy as well as electronically. And this is who we are, what we do with UK's only specialist think tank for higher education. We have relationships with 115 universities now up and down the land, all four parts of the UK, all parts of the higher education sector as well. We do work and we're totally transparent, much more transparent than most think tanks about all our funding. We do also work with a small number of large companies with an interest in higher education. I've got to say do include some publishers Elsevier, Wiley, Pearson, for example, though as I say we work with far more universities than we do companies. And we're really known, we do the things that I guess all think tanks do really. First of all, we sit between government and universities institutions and try to get the two sides to understand one another and we do that partly by trying to shape the policy debate. And we really do that in two main ways. One is we have lots and lots of events. We've recently tripled the size of our events programme. We did more than a dozen events last year. As I say, we sit in the interface between higher education and politics. So we had, for example, at our annual conference last year, we had Joe Johnson, the university's minister, come and speak at a policy briefing day we did for all the organisations, the supporters. We had Gordon Marsden, who's the Labour higher education spokesman, our annual lecture in December last year. We had Martha Cantor, who was Obama's tertiary education minister, so in charge of all further and higher education funding in Washington for the first four years of Obama's presidency. And then perhaps what we're most well known for is our research output. We did 15 policy papers last year and I'll talk a little bit more about those in a moment. I should say that my own background, we're a very small organisation and my own background is working in Whitehall and Westminster as you heard. And most of my career has been in education of some form or other because I was also a secondary school teacher for five years after leaving university. But most of my recent background is working in Westminster and Whitehall as you heard, David Wood, it's a special adviser, so some of the open access issues came across my desk. But I've got to say I'm not a great expert on library issues and access issues and I think if I'd been asked half the questions you had just asked Nick, I think I would have answered them with questions as well. And so I've just wanted to warn you that because when I was asked to speak here I did say I would want to address higher education issues a bit more generally, most of which of course directly impinge upon what you do. And I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment. But I am a user of your libraries. These are just a small proportion of some of the library. I wondered if I should test you on if you could recognise the buildings, but the first one is of course Birmingham University's old library just being replaced where I did some of my own academic research on the extreme right in Britain because they've got Oswald Moses papers. That's part of Sheffield University Library where they also have a British fascism collection. That is Churchill College Cambridge where I did some work around migration, policy migration. They've got Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Pal's papers and I spent a lot of time in the National Archives so I think they're a partner rather than a member of our UK because they're not a library of course. And those are some of the academic papers that I have myself written. So I think of myself as an amateur historian. I'm not an academic in any way but I do spend some of my own free time perusing in places like the British Library and the National Archives and as I say some of the research libraries that are older. Those are the most famous, most traditional universities. So those are some of the articles that I've written. But what do we do at Happy? We've done five papers so far in 2017. The first one we did this year was an alternative provider. So these new higher education providers which don't get direct public funding. And I think actually there is an issue there for you of course because traditionally these organisations are not being set up with good well resourced libraries very often which is one of the reasons they can keep their fees down. Secondly we found the killer fact in that report was we found even after the higher education bill goes through Parliament which is meant to introduce a level playing field for higher education providers of all types. We found there would be 500 completely unregulated higher education providers in the UK. And that by the way is not our figure. It's from the impact assessment of the government's own impact assessment on their legislation. I think they were shocked when we published that figure but we had to point them towards their own publication. Certainly the Beers Press Office was shocked by it. So there are some tangential links between that and I direct links I think between that and what you do. We did the first and only actually really detailed econometric analysis of what Brexit means for student numbers. I want to return to that in a moment. We published up the lecture by Martha Cantor who I said was the Prime Minister. She now runs in the US the campaign to have two years of free community college education study in higher education which Bernie Saunders and then Hillary Clinton were both associated with. It's a cross party group actually so there are some Republicans on it as well but we've done two other papers this year. One again which I'll return to at the very end of my remarks briefly on technology in higher education and then also one on BTECs because students arriving at university with BTECs they explain nearly an entire widening participation progress in the last decade or so. So if universities have not been accepting people with either straight BTECs or a mix of BTECs and A-levels then that widening participation progress would not have been made. But once these BTEC students get in they very often fall behind. They start actually slightly more confident than A-level students but they're much more likely to drop out and they're much more likely to drop out at research intensive universities than they are elsewhere. So about 40% of BTEC students entering research intensive universities do not complete that course. So and one of the reasons is they seem to be less well versed in some of them, the sort of independent directed learning and some of the essay writing skills and those other things that are more commonly needed at university. So again it's not totally unassociated with all the things that you do in your libraries. So I think this is an annual meeting. It's worth I think remembering all the change that has been in higher education since you last met. We've had a white paper on higher education. We've got the bill that's currently in front of the House of Lords. We've had the referendum. We've had a new prime minister. We've had the teaching functions of universities removed from the old biz department and put in the BFE. We've had the research functions stay in biz but biz has been renamed. Both those two departments have new secretaries of state. We've got of course a new US president as well and I'm not sure there'll be much time to talk about him but it's worth remembering. This cartoon amused me in the telegraph last year when all these changes were going on which I think summed up suddenly 24 hour news came into its own didn't it? But I thought what I'd do in the rest of my remarks if it's okay with you is talk a bit about the bill because the bill is really significant and if currently in the House of Lords they were debating it yesterday talk a bit more about Brexit and our research on that and I just wanted to touch on three sort of longer term issues that I think are of direct relevance to what we do. My view is because the bill on higher education that's currently before Parliament is very, very controversial. But my opinion is we do need a new legal framework for higher education in the UK. The very first report I wrote when I got too happy was that one there, unfinished business, the case for new higher education legislation and the reason I say that is as you know better than me probably the funding of universities has been transformed. The funding council doesn't do all that much funding anymore on the teaching side at least of universities. Most of that money now comes directly to universities through the fees which have to carry the burden of all sorts of things they didn't have to carry in the past like capital projects. And there's also, as I've already referred to once, been a large growth in the number of students at providers who did not come under Hefke's Aegis. And many of those are taking out quite substantial tuition fee loans and maintenance loans so there is a relevance to the public expenditure and the public realm there. This is the parliamentary processes of a bill, of a piece of legislation, first reading, second reading, committee stage, report stage, third reading. We are currently in the second R that they are in the red bit if you like. So we're nearly there with the bill actually. We're in the report stage in the House of Lords which you'll see the dates are there. Last night was the second of four days on the report stage in the House of Lords. So in terms of its sheer parliamentary progress, the bill is nearly there. But in the House of Lords, the committee stage in the House of Lords, there was 650 amendments, 120 of those were from the government and they sort of went through on the nod. The opposition only moved, only got one through which was adding a new clause to the very top of the bill to define what a university is. But the really exciting stuff is going on now, a report stage. And the government came forward last week with a whole load of amendments. They said it was going to buy off all the opposition in the House of Lords. I'll come back to that one. And it got endorsements from University Alliance, Universities UK, the Labour HE spokesman in the Lords. All these Lords' amendments that government came forward with was meant to buy off all the opposition in the Lords and that was meant to be the end of it. But in the last week, there have been four defeats of the government in the House of Lords on HE. There's been other defeats on the Brexit bill, of course. And what the Lords have said is they said there should be no link between your performance in the Teth, you know, Gold, Silver, Bronze and the fee increases. So that has gone through. They've said universities must help their students get registered to vote, which I personally agree with. They've massively watered down the government's recommendations on degree-awarding powers. They wanted new institutions to be allowed to have degree-awarding powers from day one of their education delivery. They did that only last night. And another thing they did last night was actually saying the government can't use the results of the Teth to rank providers Gold, Silver, Bronze. Now, many of those things will be overturned in the House of Commons. So just because the Lords have opposed to them, but it may be the government needs to come forward with some further amendments because otherwise we'll be in ping pong as is called between the Commons and the Lords. And the reason, by the way, the bill is having such a difficult time in the Lords and the reason the Brexit bill is having such a difficult time in the Lords as well is that is the maker of the House of Lords. The Conservatives for the first time in living memory, first time in centuries, do not have a majority in the House of Lords since they kicked out of hereditary peers, most of them. They don't have a majority. You've got to remember all those grey people at the end as well. They're the cross-benchers. If you include them, they'd have nothing like a majority in the House of Lords and actually lose votes on average more than once a week in the House of Lords. So the bill is at quite an exciting moment. And we're not out of the woods yet because there are some other really exciting amendments down, some of which I support, including this one. This is probably the one that is left that will be most lively. And this is a cross-party amendment. Lord Patton, you'll see, is up there, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister, Chancellor of Oxford, on international students. And it says, I don't know if you can read that from where you're sitting, but the Secretary of State has a duty to encourage international students. The Secretary of State must ensure that every student that has an offer to study must not be treated as a long-term migrant. They can't be in the statistics. They can't be in the government target for reducing that migration. And finally, you can't tighten the rules any more than they were when the bill gets royal ascent and becomes an act. So there will be a majority, I suspect, for this in the House of Lords. The interesting question is whether there be a majority for it in the Commons. There probably is a majority for it in the Commons, but they'll be whipped quite hard, particularly those Conservative MPs, to vote this down. I suspect, but this is probably where it will get most lively. We ourselves as an organisation have said there should be other things of the bill that aren't there, which got us a mention in the sunset column last week, because we recommended that there should be much tougher rules than there are for getting student loans back from people who leave the country. It's always written up in the tabloid press as a dig at EU students who come here, take our loans and return home. Actually, there's more money from British students who've studied here and then worked abroad. And they've tackled this problem in New Zealand in a very successful way. I don't know, I'll just leave the thought with you. It might be a better way than chasing down self-employed, higher national insurance contributions from self-employed people, I don't know. You'll need to have read today's papers together. So I'll work on Brexit. So what we did was, as you know, the university sector, and we did some of the polling, we did the first polling among students on Brexit, university sector was pretty much our one on Brexit. Students didn't want to leave, academics didn't want to leave, vice chance was certainly didn't want to leave. And there's no point in replaying those debates, but I think the one downside of the unanimity of opinion was maybe there wasn't quite as much thinking in the sector about the consequences of Brexit. If and when it should happen. And so soon after the referendum last year, we commissioned this piece of work from London Economics saying, can you just have a look at what you think Brexit means for demand at British universities? And it's a very interesting piece of work because they did two things that no one else has done. The first thing they didn't treat all British universities the same. They took a categorisation of universities developed at the University of Durham by someone called Vicky Bolliver and said, we think that different sorts of universities will be treated, will be affected by Brexit in different ways. The second thing they did was they didn't just look at the direct effect of Brexit. So the direct effect of Brexit is probably EU students don't have tuition tree loans anymore, have to pay the full international fees, but they looked at other effects. For example, there's been a depreciation of the value of the pound since June the 24th last year of about 10%, which makes UKHing cheaper relative to our main competitors for international students. And I just wanted to give you a sense of some of the results of this. Also, my green things have slightly blocked the number. Sorry, the dimensions must be slightly different to my computer at home. But the key thing here is if you raise tuition fees for EU students to the full international level, obviously the cost goes up and you would say at the same time you can't have a tuition fee loan to cover the cost. We think that will lead to a 57% decline in the number of EU students coming to the UK. The bill you can't read says 31,000. So 57% decline is 31,000. This is entrance. This is first year entrance. So we think there will be a 57% decline in the number of new EU students coming to the UK. The loss of cash income to universities as a result of that is probably less than you might expect. It's about £40 million, the other bit in green at the bottom. And that's because the ones who still come are paying the higher fees. So that was our first go at this. We then looked at that depreciation of the pound, that 10% depreciation of the pound that makes us relatively cheaper. And we said, well, actually, that might actually encourage some people even from the EU to come to the UK who might not otherwise have come here. So, for example, it will make those postgraduate courses which aren't affected by fee limits in the past and for which in the past there haven't been loans available anyway. So it might lead to a slight increase as well in the number of new students coming here. And it could also lead to a relatively significant increase in the number of non-EU students coming to the UK, which adds up to about 20,000. So you're still losing the 31,000 from the previous slide, but then you're getting about 20,000 different people very often from different countries. So the net in the gross are different. And we think the benefit of, cash benefit of these 20,000 people would be about £225 million in their fees. And if you put all that together, it's a reduction from the EU of about 26,000, an increase of about 15,000 from the rest of the world. So a net loss of about 11,000 students and the ones who are coming are likely to be the richer ones, of course, and from different range of countries on balance and that the net cash effect is actually a benefit to universities of £185 million. But as I say, all the benefit comes from the depreciation of the pound and all the loss comes from the direct result of Brexit. So there are slightly different effects. But it explains why we as an organisation have not been quite as negative as some. And when we published this data, I was quoted in the press saying Brexit is not a disaster for universities. Alistair Ffit, the vice chancellor of Oxford Brooks University was quoted the same day as saying Brexit is a disaster for universities. And actually, those two things are not mutually exclusive and I'll explain why. Our figures are just on student numbers and fee income. If you think about all those other things, so there's a question on Horizon 2020 a moment ago, then you might still end up saying it is a disaster. As I say, our report is just on student numbers and student income. But what we said is if those 20,000 are allowed to come, the net, so long as those extra 20,000 are allowed to come, they are worth about £2 billion to the British economy. Because the tuition fee income in the first year they bring is about a quarter of a billion pounds. If you look at them over their entire duration of study, it's nearly half a billion pounds. If you look at all their non-fee spending, accommodation, living costs, all of that, it's about a billion pounds. And if you look on the knock-on benefits, supply chain benefits, all of those sorts of things, you get about £2 billion. The reason our figure matters is Amber Rudd has threatened a new crackdown on international students. So the headline of our report was actually if you don't let those 20,000 extra come in while we're also losing 31,000, there could be a net cost to the British economy of £2 billion, which of course it would be dramatic. So we've made a bunch of recommendations, they're not that dissimilar to things other people have said, but remove students from international migration targets, share policy responsibility for migration with other government departments. We do something most other countries do not do, we say the Home Office has sole responsibility for student migration. Other countries share that responsibility with the Education Department, the equivalent of the Foreign Office, equivalent of the Cabinet Office, equivalent of number 10. And we've said roll out a red carpet for international students. We spend some time looking at other countries, we look at other countries in a selfish way to look at what the lessons for the UK are. And every other country we've looked at, and most recently they're Germany, Australia and New Zealand, do all these things. So this is not rockercites, this is not politically impossible stuff, this is just what they do in other countries, including our main competitors. So I've talked a bit about the Bill, I've talked a bit about Brexit. I just want to end by raising three other issues that I think are of interest. So as I said, I'm no great expert on some of the access to data, access to research questions you were discussing before. But we did produce a report on this question a couple of years ago called Open Access is a national license the answer. And the argument was written for us by a couple of people at UCL. And the argument was that you have a national level agreement between the main publishers and the British government. And then anybody with a UK IP address can have access to any research that would otherwise have been paid behind paywalls for free. Now, there are various challenges to this, is it technically possible was one challenge. I'm told it is because if you're in another country, you can't log into the BBC website and watch all their programmes because they know you don't have a UK IP address. This is the single most controversial paper I've published at Happy in my three years here. There's a distinction between our blue papers and our yellow papers. Our blue papers are analytical and less polemical. Our yellow papers are polemical. So this was meant to be nothing other than a contribution to the debate. Some people said it's a nationalist licence, not a national licence, because it only solves a UK problem, not a national problem. This was someone from Bristol said we should, this is about the most misguided proposal imaginable. I would like to see it to authors both of them senior UCL withdrawal with all possible haste with an appropriate apology. I pointed out, partly on Twitter, which you'll see up there, there was a slight irony of being an open access advocate calling for a paper to be withdrawn just because I didn't like it. And he then, you can see that he withdrew his retraction, but he then, the final one on further reflection, I withdraw my withdrawal of the call to withdraw the UK licence proposal. So this was a very, this led to three weeks of letters in the times higher elsewhere. So, and as I say, our job, we're a think tank and we're a charity. Our job is to make sure there's a healthy higher education debate. It may be that this isn't the answer. This was our attempt to tread into this terrain. And if you have better answers, please do think of us as a publishing outlet as well for better ways. I was very struck by the questions from the lady from Cambridge about whether all the incentives are wrong. The incentives are driving people in a particular direction, which means the publishers will always, always gain. You know, if, as I said, we don't just publish what I agree with, we publish anything that is an interesting, useful contribution for the debate and which gets through my advisory board because I'm accountable to various people. But that was our attempt anyway. So I draw your attention to the publication and have a look at it and see if you disagree with it as strongly as Mike Taylor did. Second issue I just wanted to talk about was the technology one. So we recently did this report on technology and of course I realised libraries are full of technology and not just books anymore. And this was written for us by colleagues at JISC who I know have a relationship with RLEK as well. And the argument is very interesting paper with a packed full of case studies and the argument in the paper is that Australia and the United States, two of our key competitors are ahead of us on technology enabled learning. But we're not so far behind that we could lose this race. We could still be up there with them or do things even better than them. And I think the thing that's really earned a lot of interest in institutions are some of the specific case studies. So, for example, a meta-analysis in the US which shows that if you redesign your courses, curriculum redesign with tech at the heart of them, then you can both reduce your costs and improve student outcomes. And of course if you start with the goal of reducing costs, then often these projects fail. If you start with the goal of improving student outcomes, you often find that you do save costs at the same time. We've got new HESA statistics out while we've all been sitting in this room. HESA has published new non-retention statistics so I haven't seen them yet. But they discovered one project in Australia that uses smart use of new technology, learning analytics to reduce non-retention rates significantly. Australia is a very good comparator because they removed student number controls five years before we did. And one of the impacts that they found of removing student number controls was their non-retention rates climbed quite significantly. And the Nottingham trend, which everybody tells me, I visit Nottingham a few times, but everyone tells me is the best learning analytics systems in the UK, show that the more you share that data with the students, the more it changes student behaviour. And we know from some data we've got from polling students that students put as their top reason for not working as hard as they should, that they're not putting in enough effort themselves. And Nottingham trend seems to have, to a certain degree, cracked that challenge of how you get students to work as hard as they know they should be, but are not always doing. We do the biggest single poll, I think, apart from the National Student Survey of students each year called the Student Academic Experience Survey, which is a survey of how hard students are working and various policy questions. And I just want to leave you, this is my final slide, with a question from that, which I think you will find salutary and useful, and maybe a killer fact from your partner sector, which is where we said to students, we used to say to students, if your university had loads more money to spend, where should they spend it? And when they realised that's not quite the environment we're in. So we now say to universities, if your university has to cut stuff, where should it spend less? And the thing that they want less spent on is buildings. And the thing that they're least willing to see cut, look down the bottom there, is reducing spending on learning facilities, e.g. IT, library or laboratory facilities. Now, I know what you're going to say, I know what you're going to say is there's a contradiction there, because what is a building other than a learning facility? And I take that point, but I suspect the answer, I suspect we get the answers we do, is that students don't want to live on building sites. They do want to be in nice, shiny new buildings, but they want to be the ones benefiting from them. They don't want to be the ones living on a building site, like when you go on holiday in Torremilino or something. But nonetheless, I think that 5% fact, the bottom of the list, is quite useful for all the things that you do. As I say, that is the area that students least want to see money cut from. And for me, that's a killer fact, which shows the importance of what you do is understood by students as well as by staff. Many thanks.