Universities in the UK may be excluded from the obligation of responding to Freedom of Information Requests for the first time since the Freedom of Information Act was introduced in 2000, in proposed changes.

A government paper on reforms to Higher Education explain: “The cost to providers [of higher education] being within the scope of the Freedom of Information Act is estimated at around £10m per year.”

The proposal, ‘Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility, and Student Choice,’ published on 6th November, aims to reduce inconsistencies between private and public providers of education. It comes as Jo Johnson’s first official statement on higher education policy since being named Minister for Universities and Science after the General Election.

Universities in the United Kingdom are currently subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which safeguards the right of any member of the public to request information held by public authorities. Information requested can range from sound recordings to emails or computer files.

Freedom of Information requests are frequently used by both student newspapers and the national press. In 2014, for example, Varsity used records released under a Freedom of Information request to expose the scale of employment below the living wage in the university, finding that 1,113 college and university staff were receiving wages of less than £7.65 an hour.

Earlier this year, Freedom of Information requests by the University and College Union (UCU) were used to outline how much Vice-Chancellors were paid. The UCU found that Professor Leszek Borysiewicz was the nineteenth highest-earning Vice-Chancellor in the country.

141 institutions out of the 155 targeted by UCU responded to questions under their obligations under the Freedom of Information Act. This allowed for the gathering of a range of data on the pay of senior university members and expenses claimed on flights or hotels by vice-chancellors at universities across the country.

Daniel Zeichner, Labour MP for Cambridge, told Varsity: “The threat to exclude universities from Freedom of Information is absolutely the wrong way to be going – if Labour had won the election, we would have extended the right to Freedom of Information to all public service providers...

“If the government is concerned about the imbalance between private and public sectors, the move should be to more openness, not more secrecy.”

The proposal is as yet a ‘green paper’, meaning it will be subject to a lengthy legislative process before becoming an Act of Parliament. It includes a number of other proposals for university reforms, including the increase of tuition fees in line with inflation and the changes making it easier for private companies to become universities.

The paper’s approach has been met with criticism from student groups, concerned with the perceived monetisation of higher education, with Megan Dunn, President of the National Union of Students, commenting: “Students should not be treated like consumers.”

The University of Cambridge’s communications department declined to comment as they consider the matter to be “sector-wide”.