On 1 August, the main duties of the UK’s  (Hefsa) – which passed in May 2023 – finally came into force. They were due to commence a year earlier but in July 2024 the newly elected Labour government halted their implementation.

Free speech campaigners fought back through sustained media pressure, direct engagement with ministers, an (including seven Nobel laureates), and a looming brought by the Free Speech Union. In January this year, education secretary Bridget Phillipson announced that the Act would be partially restored.

On paper, this sounds like a victory. Universities in England are now under a clear legal duty to take all “reasonably practicable” steps to secure freedom of speech and academic freedom within the law. The Office for Students (OfS) has issued setting out what this means in practice. Yet there is a missing piece: enforcement.

The original act contained two key enforcement mechanisms. First, a free speech complaints scheme, giving staff, students and visitors an easy and cost-free way to complain to the OfS. Second, a statutory tort, designed as a legal backstop, allowing affected individuals to sue universities in the County Court.

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In her , Phillipson said that she intends to repeal the tort but promised to retain a complaints scheme, noting that “there must be a route for righting wrongs”. However, she proposed to amend the scheme by converting the OfS’ duty to consider complaints to discretion, and by excluding students from complaining to the OfS (they will still be able, as now, to complain to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator). The Department for Education’s , published in June, reiterated this intention and stated that the government has “committed to seek a legislative vehicle at the earliest opportunity to make these changes to the complaints scheme, as well as to repeal the tort and other changes the government plans”.

As things stand, no such vehicle is in sight. The main duties have commenced; they remain effectively unenforceable. In a recent – who asked when the government intends to bring into force the complaints scheme – skills minister Jacqui Smith repeated that officials are still “seeking a suitable legislative vehicle” and suggested that academic staff could instead rely on judicial review or employment tribunals.

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That suggestion does not withstand scrutiny. Judicial review is expensive, risky and utterly impractical for individual academics to pursue. It is a remedy of last resort, available only where a decision has a sufficient public law character. Employment tribunals, likewise, cannot consider breaches of Hefsa duties. Although they have been used in discrimination or harassment claims based on protected philosophical belief, they do not protect free speech or academic freedom more generally, and the process is onerous, costly and potentially career-ending for claimants.

The OfS can, in principle, act under its existing registration conditions E1 and E2 when a university’s governance arrangements fail to uphold free speech or academic freedom – as it did earlier this year when it . But this power does not allow the OfS to act on behalf of an individual; it offers no remedy for the scholar whose rights have been breached.

The complaints scheme was designed to fill precisely this gap. Alice Sullivan’s report on , published in July, concluded that internal university procedures have failed to safeguard academics’ rights and that an independent, external mechanism is needed. It identified Hefsa’s complaints scheme as that mechanism.

Until the scheme is in force, universities can disregard their Hefsa duties with impunity. In recent months, there have been several reports of them doing so. Take Peter Pormann, a historian of language for citing the n-word to illustrate how meanings of words can shift over time. Or consider Laura Murphy at Sheffield Hallam, instructed to stop her research on China after pressure from Beijing. And consider, too, the sweeping , which staff are expected to follow. These are precisely the kinds of cases where the complaints scheme, had it been available, could have made a real difference.

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But the scheme matters for another reason, too. As the influential American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes , the law “is forever adopting new principles from life at one end, and it always retains old ones from history at the other, which have not yet been absorbed or sloughed off.” Through a steady accumulation of low-stakes precedents, the complaints scheme would have offered the sector a practical, evolving guide to navigating the new statutory duties. Without it, the promise of Hefsa will remain unfulfilled.

What, then, should be done? The government should immediately publish a timetable for the legislation needed to amend the complaints scheme. As an interim measure, ministers should use a statutory instrument to commence the complaints scheme forthwith, as enacted, save only the paragraphs relating to students’ union complaints (whose corresponding duties are slated for repeal). That would provide a working route to redress while Parliament considers any refinements. Along with colleagues, I have organised an urging the government to take these steps, and we invite academics and public figures to sign it.

There is no justice without access to justice. The has been long and hard-fought. Important ground has been won: universities now have clear statutory duties, a vigilant regulator and guidance that, if applied, could transform campus culture. It is time for the government to finish the job.

is professor of mathematics at Queen Mary University of London. He is a founder member of the London Universities’ Council for Academic Freedom and an advisory board member of the Committee for Academic Freedom. He writes here in a personal capacity.

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