David Willetts - shadow universities secretary

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David Willetts tells ePolitix.com what the big themes of this year's Conservative Party conference will be.

Question: What are the big challenges for universities in the coming months and years?

Willetts: One of the great issues that universities have been rather complacent about is the quality of the student experience.

That is something that can't simply be measured by survey but it is how much time the student gets with an academic; how crowded are seminars, how long does it take to respond to essays and what kind of informed feedback you get on your work - and I think all of that is very important.

Universities need to see through the eyes of students and when you talk to them, that is the sort of concerns you hear raised all the time.

Students are incredibly committed, hard working and they do want to get the most out of university and some times they are frustrated by that.

Obviously for academics and people running universities which are often large, successful institutions with a budget of perhaps £100m, £200m, then they are always feeling financial pressures and they are feeling, as always with this government, that there is an awful lot of clumsy command and control.

What I would like to see across the board of public services - hospitals and schools as well - is to give these institutions a bit more space to be themselves and do a better job of serving their students and be places of learning.

That is also true for further education colleges, which are, in many ways, the Cinderella institutions that don't get the attention they deserve.

We gave them freedom from local authority control in 1992 and they are now again tied up in lots of detailed controls with conditions attached to funding from the Learning and Skills Council and reverting to local authority funding and so we want to give them greater freedom as well.

That in turn enables you to tackle the problem of Neets [young people not in education, employment or training] which I was writing about years ago, long before the word Neet had entered the vocabulary.

I think it is a national scandal that the number of young people in that position is higher than it was 10 years ago - nobody could have predicted that when Labour introduced the New Deal that things would be worse a decade after it had started.

This is not some natural disaster that we can only shrug our shoulders at, this is the result of policy failure and if we improve the process of policymaking then we can do better by making it easier for FE colleges to do more to reach out to these people and making sure they have vocational qualifications that mean something in the jobs market.

You hope there is coherence to what you do in politics and you hope that it all hangs together and for me it has always been the link between the economic and the social.

For me a strong economy and a strong society go together and although I began as someone interested in financial and monetary policy I do think, having spent years on the pensions and benefits side of politics, you see the consequences of economic failure and you realise the power of education reform and the power of welfare reform to tackle those problems.

Question: Do you think the government has been negligent in developing vocational skills?

Willetts: Labour has done the typical thing in that Brown talks about more apprenticeships but doesn't achieve more of them. By making it easier for employers to take more people on and increase the supply side, he achieves apparent increases by redefining apprenticeships.

Now a lot of what in the past would have been dismissed as youth training schemes is counted as apprenticeships. So level three apprenticeships, roughly equivalent to an A-level, where you do a real job with an employers have disappeared whilst there are more level two apprenticeships that are equivalent to a GCSE and in the past would not have been counted as apprenticeships and are being now.

They may be useful and it's good that FE colleges provide them but calling them apprenticeships means that Brown has achieved his target but not by doing something difficult and important in the real world but by redefining what he means by apprenticeships.

That kind of thing that makes people cynical about politics and this government and that's why no-one now listens to them.

Question: Is the government's goal of getting 50 per cent of young people into higher education a useful aim or an arbitrary figure?

Willetts: It's very odd because they are not going to achieve their target and they seem to be getting further and further away from it.

The only value it has is to remind us that going into higher education is a good thing and we want to see more young people going into higher education.

I also want to see more mature people going into higher education and the we should never be grudging about people going to university, it is fantastic and I want to see as many people as can possibly benefit from going to university going.

It is a useful signal but Brown isn't going to reach it and it doesn't seem to have any effect on his policies.

Willetts on party conference

Question: What will be the big themes at this year's Conservative Party conference?

Willetts: Without getting complacent at all, as we get closer to the election people want to know what we would do in government.

It is very exciting being in the shadow cabinet. Having been in the shadow cabinet for so long there is now more interest in what our policies are than I can remember in the 10 years I've been here, that's fantastic.

People will want to see more about how we would tackle Britain's problems and there will be a strong sense at the party conference of the practical policy agenda. Also there will be the themes that hold it together as David Cameron has set out very carefully of a stronger society, of a flexible economy.

For me a theme that I attach importance to, especially having worked for so long on pensions and now education is fairness across the generations.

I think all of us in middle age have a responsibility to discharge to the generation ahead of us - to older people - and equally, we have an obligation to the younger generation.

I have enjoyed fantastic opportunities and the benefits of a free education all the way through university paid for by the taxpayer and I do worry that we are not providing the next generation with the same opportunities that we have enjoyed ourselves.

It is why it is such a scandal that social mobility is falling. We are starting to wonder if our children will be able to get on the housing ladder; get qualifications that employers value; will they earn enough to hold down family responsibilities?

Will they end up paying enormous bills for environmental damage that we have caused by our profligacy? Are we spending so much and running such a big budget deficit that they will be picking up the bill for our excessive borrowing?

So what I feel is that we have an obligation to the younger generation not to dump problems on them and I think at the moment we are doing that.

Question: But you are not suggesting the Conservatives would get rid of university tuition fees and go back to grants?

Willetts: No because now we have many more people going to university then it is hard to imagine how you could have the kind of expansion that we have seen could continue.

Each generation has different circumstances, you can't simply return to how the world was in the past but you can aim, in different circumstances, to at least create better opportunities to make a better life.

A good way of measuring policies is to look at the extent that they increase social mobility and create more opportunities for the next generation.

Question: Do the Conservatives have to be careful not be complacent about regaining power at the next election?

Willetts: One of the great things that David Cameron is always saying to us in shadow cabinet, quite rightly, is "do not take things for granted, do not be complacent."

One of the things that people don't like about this government is its arrogance. One of the really important and chastening things about opposition is that you have to be so much closer to the electorate.

When you watch a government lose touch there is this process of decay and we mustn't be in any way complacent.

By having a 'preparing for government' session at conference we are not presuming anything, we are merely saying if we are in government after the next election then one of our crucial responsibilities is to arrive properly prepared.

In 1979 when the Conservatives arrived I was a civil servant in the Treasury and the civil service made a serious mistake in not taking the Thatcher agenda seriously.

It took them several years to realise that this had been properly thought out and it was an agenda for rescuing the sick man of Europe.

In 1997, the paradox was that the civil service had learnt the lesson of 1979 and was ready to be deployed and yet the Blair government didn't trust them, hadn't really prepared anything in opposition, weren't ready to work with the Whitehall machine and, as Blair subsequently admitted, they wasted a lot of their first term.

I was sitting there watching them dismantle GP fund holders and grant maintained schools and knew that they would have to come back to them, as they did, in a diluted form.

So if we get in next time we have to have done the serious work in preparation and we have to have a mature relationship with the civil service so we can use it in the way it is designed to be used by an incoming government.

In my experience, civil servants get fed up when the government has no ideas and no political authority and I hope I could contribute to making the gears to mesh in and making the country a better place.