Lord Laird – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Laird on 2015-11-26.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they treat universities that receive public funding as private or public institutions.

Baroness Neville-Rolfe

In general, universities that receive public grant funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England are private institutions.

However there are instances where the law does consider them to be public authorities. For example, they are listed in Schedule 1 to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 as public authorities for the purposes of that Act. However, for the purposes of the Human Rights Act 1998, they are considered to be ‘hybrid’ public authorities, which means that that Act only applies to their public functions, and not their private ones.