Sussex University overturns £585,000 fine as high court rejects free speech breach claim

Sussex University has overturned a £585,000 fine by England’s higher education watchdog after the high court rejected claims the university had breached free speech regulations involving its former professor Kathleen Stock.

The ruling is a damaging blow to the credibility and management of the Office for Students, after the court rejected the regulator’s lengthy investigation into Sussex’s handling of the protests aimed at Stock over her views on transgender rights and her subsequent resignation in 2021.

The £585,000 fine announced by the OfS in March last year was the largest ever levied by the regulator, but Wednesday’s high court ruling will send it and the Department for Education back to the drawing board to establish its legal authority.

The result also calls into question the role played by Arif Ahmed, the former Cambridge University philosopher who led the investigation into Sussex. Ahmed was appointed by the previous government as the OfS’s first “free speech tsar” – formally known as director for freedom of speech and academic freedom – in 2023.

The OfS’s three-and-half-year-long investigation claimed that Sussex’s “governing documents” included policy statements on transgender issues that were liable to stifle or restrict free speech. But Sussex’s vice-chancellor, Sasha Roseneil, said the OfS had incorrectly included irrelevant or peripheral documents and lacked legal authority to do so, describing the fine as “wholly disproportionate”.

At the high court hearings in March, Sussex’s lawyers said the OfS decision was “procedurally unfair” and its approach was “in certain respects unreasonable”.

The OfS had argued that the policy statements constituted a governing document that was in breach of public interest governance principles of freedom of speech and academic freedom.

But Sussex challenged the OfS ruling on multiple grounds, including that the trans and non-binary equality policy statement at the centre of the OfS case was not a core governing document of the university and so not subject to OfS registration conditions.

It also argued that the university’s internal “scheme of delegation” – the subject of the second breach – formed part of its internal rules and was also outside OfS jurisdiction. The university’s lawyers also said the OfS decision was “procedurally unfair” and its approach was “in certain respects unreasonable”.

Stock resigned from Sussex in October 2021, shortly after she had been told by police to stay away from campus following a series of protests, and feared her 18-year career at the university had been “effectively ended” after Sussex’s branch of the University and College Union called for an investigation into institutional transphobia.