[3] In the 2010s, however, activist attention came to focus more on public figures viewed as transphobic, and some journalists and politicians argued that no platform policies were being extended well beyond the far right.

[6] In March 2021, David Miller, a professor at the University of Bristol, was put under investigation after making controversial remarks on Zionism, another incident that raised concerns over academic freedom.

[10] The bill would create a statutory tort enabling individuals to sue for compensation for losses suffered from an academic institution's failure to protect freedom of speech.

After being carried over into the 2022–23 parliamentary session, it received a third reading on 13 June 2022 and was introduced in the House of Lords by the Earl Howe the following day.

The motion also proposed that if a claimant was just seeking an injunction, the provision that legal proceedings could only be brought after an existing complaints scheme had been exhausted would not apply.

On 10 May 2023, the House of Lords considered the Commons amendment to clause 4 to define 'loss' as both pecuniary and non-pecuniary, and to allow an individual to seek a court injunction without first exhausting a complaints scheme.

The bill received royal assent by King Charles III on 11 May 2023 and became the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act.

[22] However, the Cambridge philosophy lecturer Arif Ahmed, who led a successful campaign in 2020 to overturn a proposed free speech code at the university demanding respect for others' identities,[23] called the bill "extremely welcome", though he added that "a top-down approach is never going to be a complete solution".

[22] Julian Sladdin, a higher education expert at the law firm Pinsent Masons, noted that persons seeking to make claims under the bill would still need to demonstrate that any breach of duty had caused them legally significant loss, and expressed scepticism that this would "easily translate into successful litigation in most cases".