I know very little about foreign universities and accreditation. Is this university legit? https://www.uclan.ac.uk/
It is a former polytechnic that is now a "post-1992" university. This is a big distinction in the UK. For example, as a student at a "red brick" university, I could not have a doctoral supervisor nor an external examiner from a post-1992 uni. In 1992, the UK "universitised" its polytechnics, giving them university status and the ability to award their own degrees without CNAA validation. This was supposed to reduce the "binary divide" between universities and polytechnics, but old thinking is sometimes slow to age out. These "new universities" are generally considered lower in prestige, but they're perfectly legitimate and recognized.
I hadn't been familiar with this transition but had observed that polytechnics aren't really a thing in the UK compared to elsewhere in the world. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, @Rich Douglas! For those curious, Wikipedia has a pretty lengthy list of the post-1992 universities in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-1992_university?lang=en
I've never attended one, but I like the idea of polytechnics like I like community colleges. They're both very practical. New Zealand is vacillating. They brought them all under one roof, then the new administration un-did it. I can't tell what the future holds, but I'm going to take a deeper dive. South Africa has also had an evolving relationship with polytechnics ("technikons"). Or maybe I'm just mad because my favorite, Technikon SA, got gobbled up by Vista University, which in turn got folded into several schools. Technikon SA went to UNISA and disappeared.