Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week, we're taking a look at the crisis in higher education, as financial woes threaten the UK's

world-renowned university sector, with dozens of institutions in serious financial difficulties,

with fears of cuts, closures and potential collapse.

We need to discuss what is causing such strain on universities, how it can be solved, what may happen if it doesn't,

and delighted to be joined by former university's minister and conservative peer Lord Joe Johnson,

as well as Vivian Stern, Chief Executive of Universities UK, the body represents 141 Unies, Jess Lister,

Director of the Strategy Consultancy Public First, who leads on the higher education work,

as well as Sarah Stevens, Director of Strategy at the Russell Group of leading universities,

and my colleague Matilda Martin, reporter here at Polholm.

So starting with you, Matilda, you've reported a lot on this for us and also before you joined us at the TES. So you can just explain to us what we mean by the kind of the crisis in

university finances. Sure. I mean, I think it would be fair to say that this is a crisis that's

been slowly building for a number of years. And I think it would also be fair to say that

this is a crisis that the Labour government didn't necessarily think they would have to deal with

or didn't necessarily want to have to deal with. I think obviously their priorities when they came in

were very much kind of off-stead, early years, skills and universities is something that's definitely

kind of emerged.

So if we think about kind of where we're at, so earlier this year, the university's watchdog,

the office for students warned that almost half of the country's universities were expecting

to be in financial deficit by the summer. We've had a number of issues. Over the last years,

we've had the falling international students, the decline in the real terms value of tuition

fees, and both of those things have contributed to financial challenges. We've also got kind

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