02/10/2011 The Politics Show Northern Ireland

On the Politics Show in Northern Ireland, we talk to the Secretary

of Sstate ahead of his speech to the Tory conference in Manchester.

And why Magee college thinks it needs thousands more students to

Apology for the loss of subtitles for 2158 seconds

Hello. With demand for student places ever-increasing, why can't

the north-west expand Magee College into a major centre of learning? Is

it really just a matter of cash? The Higher Education Minister

Stephen Farry is here to answer those questions. As the

Conservative faithful gathered in Manchester, we talk to the

Secretary of State about the past and the future as corporation tax

plans seem to be some time away. And as the presidential field

shapes up, we take our weekly look at the race for the Aras in the

Republic. Executive ministers strapped for

cash are having to make tough choices. The popular but expensive

decision to hold down tuition fees for local students means the

Department of Employment unnerving as to disappoint someone else. For

example, at the University of Ulster in Londonderry has seen its

plans for expansion knocked back. We have spent the week on campus.

It may be small, but Magee campus has big ambitions. From a tiny base

of fewer than three dozen students in the mid- 1980s, more than 4000

students study here today -- 3000 students in the mid- 1980s. But the

universities wings have been clipped. The Higher Education

Minister Stephen Farry travelled to Magee recently to deliver the news

that he was turning down his request for 1000 extra places next

year. The cost of keeping tuition fees down for local students has

left his two per share -- has left his department strapped for cash.

Then certainly sympathetic to the case, but it is not going to happen

on the scale that people have hoped for. We are looking at a region

that has seen job losses over recent years. The whole demolition

of the textile industry. But we need to go forward, not just in

terms of student places, but delivering for Derry. I don't

believe there are too many within the Executive standing up for Derry

at the moment. It does have to be asked whether simply expanding the

number of university places in the City would have a permanent effect

on the economy. Yes, students would spend money in the area, there

would be extra employment and staff, but would there be a large scale of

universities spin-offs? A lot depends on how far people

graduating from Bibb -- Magee would actually stake in the region.

year, almost 6000 places -- people applied to Magee. It is already

heavily oversubscribed with more than 5000 -- more than five

students competing for every place. Next ear, demand will surge with

more students applying for local universities because of the

increase in fees in Great Britain. The difficulty is that it is

already extremely competitive to get a place and grades are

increasing. We have now taken to interviewing students as well as

asking for grades. We don't want to be in a situation where we raise

aspirations and then slammed the door in people's faces. Considering

it will have about a billion pounds less to spend over the next four

years, Executive is busy juggling figures and setting priorities.

There was I financial relative. -- there is a financial reality. There

is only so much money. We can either spend it on hospitals or

schools or universities or social housing. You cannot spend it on all

of those things. No matter what decision you make, it can have a

profound effect on Northern Ireland and upset quite a lot of people.

don't think there is enough long- term strategic planning and

privatisation of the higher education agenda. The Department

have said they are working on an evidence-based process, so we just

wait and see. That translates to us lurching from crisis to crisis.

When we have the demand, we will scurry around and try to find the

place is. We know we are facing increased pressures and we know

there will be increased demand, so why can we not plan ahead?

University of Ulster's ambitions far exceed the expansion of Magee.

This is how its new Belfast campus might look. The Jordanstown campus

is now said to be obsolete. Denude plan is largely funded by borrowing

as well as the universities own resources. With the Belfast

relocation, the problem that goes on is that money becomes tighter

and tighter. You do worry about contingencies, about what is likely

to come from left field. One group who do not have to be left

convinced -- do not have to be convinced about the move is the

thousands of students who commute to the odd cambers every day.

Better and more convenient for people who have travelled every day,

especially people who live in the country. It is very expensive

travelling. It is about �30 a week. It would be great if it moved to

the city centre. This is my second year. I chose it because I thought

Queen's it was a bit more old- fashioned. I liked the more modern

feel of the Jordanstown side. universities Minister, Stephen

Farry, has promised to find the money for just a few hundred extra

places in time for next year. But these will be spread across the

institutions. Yvette Magee, many students come from socially

disadvantaged backgrounds and the fear is that they will be squeezed

out in the race for limited places. The ball is now firmly in the

Minister's court and Stephen Farry is with me now. You are very

welcome. You heard the professor in the broadcast say that there is too

much crisis-management, not enough strategic planning. We now have

clarity as to what is going to happen with student finance over

the next three to four years. We have got a very good deal for more

than Ireland, it is not perfect, but in the context of a fixed

budget, and on the assumption -- to ask to freeze tuition fees and

secondly to protect the existing budgets of the University, which we

have also achieved, thirdly to have the expansion of university places,

it was always going to be incredibly tough. But if you have

85 empty school places and you have five students chasing up every

place at university, that is bad planning by any measure boss of

those at issues to be discussed at the Executive. There is a very

heavy case for a lot more sharing and Integration in Education as a

way of addressing that. We have to recognise that we have very high

participation rates. We have the highest participation rates of any

region of the UK. Something like 48 %. It looks like you will be

presiding over declining numbers. I am hoping it will be maintained. If

we had increased tuition fees, that would have deterred some young

people from going to university. That is something we did in terms

of access. We want people to go to university because it is the right

thing for them, not because of whether they can pay. You have

disappointed Magee, but what about the Belfast campus, is that going

to go ahead? My department has signed off on the business case for

that. I am confident it will proceed. In terms of Magee, I am

obviously disappointed that they cannot move further with expansion

and Magee. We do have some money that we did so dear in terms of the

negotiations to raise finance that will allow for a modest increase in

university places. But that has to be managed right across Northern

Ireland. The hundred extra places next year, why did use bread does

because Maya then Ireland, rather than Magee core where demand is so

high? -- across Northern Ireland. The main rationale for securing the

additional resources that we did get was to make sure we could

manage it across the board. This is an initial investment. We know

there will be increased demand in Northern Ireland. But the evidence

of what that is going to be in real terms, I have the option of going

back to bid for additional options, and double not hesitate to do that.

What about the programme for government? We have heard Paul

Gosling from the University for dairy campaign so that he has seen

a need to draft and it does not make reference to the regeneration

of debris. It will cover a very wide range of issues. It will not

cover every single thing that every department will do over the next

three or four years. If you look passed over the last government, it

did not take all of those boxes either. I am confident that this

will be a much more rounded document than what has been seen in

the past. You cannot separate the grace of the economy from a very

well educated at well -- workforce. Where is the vision? We have a very

difficult and tough decision but we took where we managed to achieve by

the freezing of tuition fees and sustaining the funding of our

universities. Some people are arguing that we should take money

away from the universities in order to keep the fees down. But we have

managed to achieve both of those. Our universities are central to our

economic vision into respect. Purfleet by providing a critical

mass of graduates. -- firstly. have heard in the Assembly this

week the education minister say he is going to tackle those 85,000

empty places. Doing your department might benefit from that in the

longer term? I don't think we will see those savings filtering through

during this current round of the Budget. It will be a long-term

change. There is going to be more demand locally whenever we have a

situation where fees are kept down in Northern Ireland. We are going

to see increased demand from students who perhaps would

otherwise have gone too great Britain. That is a pressure we have

to face up to. Will you charge, in future, more for arts degrees than

science degrees Question Of but is currently not part of our thinking.

But we will encourage people to do degrees that up economic the

relevant to our future. Conservatives are gathering in

Manchester for their annual conference. Bins and speed limits

appeared to be high on the agenda, but our Secretary of State is also

busy. I managed to get a quick chat with Owen Paterson and asked him

about the likely delay to changes in corporation tax here, a policy

he has championed. I have made a major plank of our programme a

necessity to rebalance the economy every number of years. We all know

the reasons in recent decades where there is a series over-dependence

on public spending in the Northern Ireland economy. The promised in

the election that we would bring forward a consultation paper on

rebalancing the economy, in particular looking at the

possibility of dissolving corporation tax -- devolving

corporation tax to the Executive and the Assembly. We have done just

that. We have had a vigorous consultation process. You are

embarking on more talks. promised a paper and a consultation,

which we did. They had been a significant number of whispers one

-- the sponsors and we will shortly make our announcement about the

next steps. It does seem to be more about process in progress. You are

talking more than actually doing anything. The you can make that

accusation if you want. I think we are behaving in a responsible

manner. We said we would have a consultation based on a Treasury

paper and we did exactly that. They have been a significant number of

responses. As I understand it, a positive. A sensible, rational

government will progress in a sensible, rational manner. That is

what we intend to do and we will make our announcements shortly.

say your party is the party of the Union, but there is a view that

devolution is undermining the union. When you get the issue of tuition

fees, you see regions acting very selfishly. Scotland had lower fees

for Scottish students. Northern Ireland looks set to follow. Some

of these announcements have caused anger, particularly in England. I

think it is for politicians in the devolved administrations to think

carefully about the UK impact of some of their announcements. But

for us at UK level, we have to accept that devolution will bring

forward a variation and there will be different regimes in different

areas of policy according to which part of the United Kingdom you are

run. You are championing Conservative policies cost --

policies, how committed a you took rebranding them in Northern

Ireland? We have been quite clear. The Prime Minister has been clear

about this. We think it would be a good thing if people right across

the United Kingdom could vote for candidates who could end up in

government in Westminster and it could also pose a bigger one to be

ministers if they were good enough. We're clearly committed to that of

gold. We would like to see Northern Ireland brought into the mainstream

of national politics. We are committed to working to that.

also say you are committed to the security of Northern Ireland. You

are remembering the murder, the policeman murdered earlier this

year. What more can you do to stamp out this dissident threat? That was

a really dreadful crime, and to murder a young man he had decided

to devote himself to the whole community. I think we owe it to

work together. There was an extraordinary coming together of

the community shortly after the murder when so many people from so

many different parts of the community attended D funeral. We

work very closely with deep the bald Minister and he PSNI. We work

extremely closely with the government into Dublin. We did put

in and endorse an extra �50 million for the PSNI last year. This year,

we negotiated a really quite exceptional extra �200 million over

the next four years as requested by the PSNI. Together, will we are

absolutely determined to beat this very small number of violent people

who do not accept the peace process and the opportunity that the

institutions we have offered to everybody in Northern Ireland.

want to move beyond the politics of the peace process, but we still

have the legacy of the past. How you going to redress that? We heard

the deputy leader of the Alliance Party say it is time for all party

talks on the issue. Is that something you would support? I have

been talking to all parties over the last few months. But sadly

there is no consensus across the parties on how to handle the past.

We, the UK government, do not own the past. We can help work with the

local parties, local politicians and local groups, but this is not

entirely in our hands. The Minister of State and I have been talking to

numerous people over recent months. Looking to see a way forward and

picking up on some of the very good ideas. In some ways, it is a major

element of what has been proposed. We will continue to talk to local

people, local politicians and local groups to see a way forward.

After months of guesswork over who would run and he would not, this

week, the nominations process for the Irish presidential election

finally ended. After a frantic scrabble around local councils and

the Republic, Dana Rosemary Scallon and Michael Norris got the support

they needed and the Irish presidential election was settled

with seven nominations. The starting gun finally fired this

week for the magnificent seven. Nominations closed at high noon on

Wednesday and first up on the campaign trail was here for the

first in a series of radio and TV debates. What did we learn?

Mitchell told us he had the experience to put his shoulder to

the wheel. Dana Rosemary Gallup -- Dana Rosemary Scallon said she

would learn on the job. Mary Davies wants to rename the Aras. Michael D

Higgins said he would run a vigorous campaign. Certainly not

more walking and talking to come over the next four weeks.