And, there are also differences in the way that universities have secured funding for investing in their estates. So, for example, Cardiff University have had a bond rather than borrowing, which you draw down as you're spending. So, in the short term, the reserves of Cardiff will appear as though they have significant cash balances, but all of those are restricted for investment in the estate and, over the next two or three years, will be utilised for that.
So, overall, you're painting a picture of a sector that's under a significant degree of financial stress, and this is obviously using your key financial indicators. Do you monitor each and every university, or do you wait for them to come back and tell you what their situation is?
We monitor, we receive forecasts, five-year forecasts, and we meet frequently with all our universities now. It varies, depending on the risks of the universities, as to how frequently we meet, but we're actually meeting with every university because even the forecast that we received last July, the changes, even in the 12-month period, are significant enough for us to need a better understanding of what the latest position is. The forecasts, if I just run through—. We had a sector that, in 2017-18, had a deficit. Although it had a turnover and income of £1.5 billion, which had increased, nonetheless it had a small deficit of 0.4 per cent of income in 2017-18, which was an improvement on the deficit the year before of 1.7 per cent, but notably, again, the sector in England were looking at surpluses of 3 per cent to 4 per cent in the same period. The forecasts that we had this time last year were indicating that, for 2018-19, we should have a sector that's roughly in a break-even position, but that has to be caveated with waiting for new forecasts in July, where there will have to be a reflection of the pension costs, and there have been significant changes in pension costs, both for the teachers' pension scheme and the universities' superannuation scheme as well, and those will be significant costs that universities have to build into their forecasts at a time when their income, certainly their fee income, is not increasing, and that is the challenge.
Are we going to lose any universities in the next couple of years?