England’s new free speech law comes into force – what it means for universities
The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 comes into force throughout England on August 1 2025. Designed to stop universities from censoring controversial or unpopular ideas, the law gives the Office for Students responsibility for ensuring institutions comply.
This law will mean that many universities will have to change the way they approach free speech.
When it comes to adopting campus speech policies, educational establishments have always had three choices.
One option has been to follow the law, permitting whichever messages the law already allows, while banning whichever messages the law already forbids. UK law prohibits, for example, certain core expressions of racism, anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, Islamophobia, antisemitism, or glorification of terrorism. I’ll call this the “legalist” option.
Another approach is to allow more speech than the law allows. This would, for example, permit guest lecturers to advocate white supremacy or the belief that only heterosexual relationships and behaviour are normal. I’ll call this the “libertarian” option. It treats free speech as sacrosanct.
But this option would never be adopted. Few institutions would welcome the torrent of parental complaints, media publicity, donor withdrawals, police investigations, or full-blown litigation that would follow.
A third option is to permit less speech than the law allows. This would mean, for example, banning sexist speech, which is otherwise still permitted under UK law. We can call this the “communitarian” option. It views educational institutions as more than just places for exchanging ideas: they must also promote civic values, aiming to build an empathic society.
Changing approaches
In the past, British universities could choose option three, cancelling or avoiding events featuring messages that, although legal, risk stoking campus divisions.
Some institutions have stopped controversial speakers through decisions by senior leadership. For example, in 2013 UCL’s senior administrators banned a group that advocated sex segregation. Other times, efforts to cancel events have been made by students or staff. In 2015, the University of York cancelled events for International Men’s Day after complaints from students and staff.
The effect of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act will be to shift universities from the communitarian to the legalist model. Campus members wishing to stage events will still have to comply with routine guidelines on reserving campus venues, ticketing participants, ensuring security controls, and the like. However, under the act, universities may no longer impede the communication of otherwise legal messages solely on the grounds of their provocative content.
For advocates of free speech, this act may still not go far enough since it keeps an escape hatch. Management can still cancel controversial events if the institution lacks the means to ensure adequate security, and such claims are often difficult to verify.
Yet for others, the act will go too far. Some would argue that existing law in Britain does not adequately protect vulnerable groups, and that universities should stick to the communitarian ideal, creating a refuge that the law often fails to provide.
These anxieties become ever greater in our internet era, when misinformation can proliferate. Some may fear that abandoning the communitarian ethos will turn the campus into a wild west of free speech, disproportionately affecting its most vulnerable members.
The act aims to preserve free speech on university campuses.
Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock
However, online communications have also proved to be powerful mobilising tools for staff and students, so online power hierarchies may work in more complex ways than meets the eye.
Note also that nothing in the act abolishes student welfare services. Individually targeted acts of bullying, threats, stalking and harassment will remain under the aegis of campus oversight as well as UK law. Staff or students exhibiting racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic conduct will remain as subject as they were before to disciplinary proceedings and even dismissal or expulsion.
Finally, it is worth bearing in mind that the act’s most salient ingredients are procedural, placing considerable burdens on institutions to facilitate free speech and deal transparently with accusations of censorship. Yet whether this will lead to an explosion of complaints, and whether ideas exchanged on campus will really differ so much from those we already hear today, remains to be seen.
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Eric Heinze has received funding for submitting a report to the UK Commission for Countering Extremism.
