East Lancs university centres 'well placed to avoid cuts' (From Lancashire Telegraph)

East Lancs university centres 'well placed to avoid cuts'

4:34pm Wednesday 23rd December 2009

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UNIVERSITIES in East Lancashire are confident they are ‘well-placed’ to avoid being hit by multi-million pound funding cuts and fines for over-recruiting students.

In his annual grant letter to the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Business Secretary Lord Mandelson said the cuts were needed to pay for the ‘higher than expected cost’ of funding grants and loans for the record numbers going to university in the recession.

Representatives of UCLan, which has a campus in Burnley, and Blackburn College, which runs degree courses said they were keen to establish how the cuts will affect their respective institutions.

But both said they were confident of being able to ‘move forward’ because of safeguarding work that had taken place.

The letter announces cuts of £135 million to universities budgets for next year.

This is on top of the £600 million efficiency savings to be made from 2012, which were announced in the Chancellor’s Pre-Budget report.

Yana Williams, vice principal of Blackburn College, which recently opened its flagship University Centre, said: "The University Centre at the college has gone through many developments to ensure that it is responsive to the potential changes in funding and we feel the college is well placed to move forward with the changes announced.”

UCLan’s vice-chancellor Malcolm McVicar said: “The university very much regrets these new funding cuts for Higher Education as the sector is a great success story of the UK economy.

“It will take some time for UCLan to work out the consequences of the cuts but we remain committed to our ambitious development plans and will continue to build on our success over the last 10 years.”

The letter also says that universities will be fined £3,700 for every student they took on this autumn above the limited set out by the Government.

But Dr Martin Brown, director of UCLan Burnley Campus, said the campus has been given 500 additional numbers to use in its first two years.

And a request for more numbers has been submitted.

He said: “We have been careful to make sure we are within our allocation. We have been careful when recruiting this year and it will be the same next year.”

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