The Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation (Joseph Johnson)
The Labour party wants to talk about process because its policy platform is disintegrating before our eyes. I welcome the opportunity to set out once again the Government’s approach to the student fees regulations. This is hardly new terrain for Parliament. The Government made it clear as far back as the Budget in June 2015 that maximum tuition fees would rise in line with inflation, and I set out changes to fees in detail for 2017-18 in a written ministerial statement in July 2016. Changes to fees were subsequently extensively debated during the passage through both Houses of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, with numerous votes on student finance issues that were all won by the Government.
The regulations are not “proposed” as the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) suggested: they have been in force for six months. This debate, which cannot change arrangements for 2017-18, is therefore a sham exercise. I suspect that this is simply more of the same cynical politics we saw over the weekend, when Labour broke its own pre-election pledge—about which we have heard so much this afternoon—to write off historic student loan debts.
Let us recall precisely what the Leader of the Opposition told the NME seven days before the general election. He said:
“I don’t see why those that had the historical misfortune to be at university during the £9,000 period should be burdened excessively compared to those that went before or those that come after. I will deal with it.”
That was a clear pledge to young voters. The first sign of trouble came when the shadow Education Secretary said a few days ago that she was still trying to work out the costs of that policy on a big abacus. The penny dropped completely over the weekend when we heard from the shadow Chancellor and others that that pre-election promise was being downgraded to the lowly status of an ambition. We all know what that means. It means that it is never ever going to happen. It does not do anything for the credibility of the Labour party to abandon such a striking commitment to young people just a few weeks after the general election.
Simon Hoare
I may be becoming a little forgetful, but was the manifesto to which my hon. Friend just referred the “fully costed” manifesto from the Labour party?
Joseph Johnson
My hon. Friend has exposed the truth, which is that the Labour party is delivering what is perhaps the biggest act of political deception we have seen in decades. It is the old game of bait and switch, saying one thing before a general election and another thing immediately after. Of course, given that this would be a £100 billion hit to our public finances, which would hurt hard-working taxpayers across the country and deliver a significant addition to our national debt and the interest burdens of the next generation, I am glad that the Labour party has done this spectacular and embarrassing U-turn. I suspect that it will not be too long before it abandons the rest of its unaffordable, unfunded and fantastical policy platform. It is a programme that it has clearly taken wholesale from the statist playbooks of 1970s tax-and-spend regimes that all ended up needing the International Monetary Fund to step in.
The policy that Labour proposed before the general election would have increased our national debt by a whole five percentage points of GDP, adding no less than £3,500 to the debt carried by every household in the country.
Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)
At what point does my hon. Friend think the hon. Lady decided to make that U-turn? Can he enlighten the House on that? It seems a real puzzle.
Joseph Johnson
I suspect that the Opposition decided to do that spectacular U-turn when they realised what impact it would have on hard-working taxpayers up and down the country. As I have said, the proposal to write off student debt will add £3,500 to the debt carried by every household in the country.
Ms Karen Lee
The decision to scrap the maintenance grant means that the most disadvantaged students will graduate with the highest level of debt. Does the Minister think that is fair?
Joseph Johnson
A better way of looking at it is that the Government are making the most resources available to the people who are most in need of them. We want people from disadvantaged backgrounds to go to university. We are delighted that they are doing so in record numbers, and that they are now 43% more likely to do so than they ever were before.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
If we were to put the best possible gloss on what the Leader of the Opposition said, and imagine that he was merely misunderstood in his intentions by students when he said that he would “deal with it”, what faith can we put in the new language that is being used? It is now being said that the Opposition will merely “look at” a number of propositions. If we cannot trust what “deal with” means, how can we possibly trust merely “look at”?
Joseph Johnson
That is exactly right. The Opposition’s policy platform is collapsing before our eyes. The inevitable next step is their abandonment of the albatross around their neck that is their policy of abolishing tuition fees in their entirety. They are currently saddled with it. They are trying to wriggle off the hook of their clear promise to abolish student debt, and they will soon be trying to get rid of that appalling albatross of getting rid of tuition fees in total. As I have said, abolishing student debt would mean a huge addition to our net debt. The proposal to abolish tuition fees and reinstate maintenance grants would add £12 billion to the national deficit, which is equivalent to 0.7% of GDP and to an additional 2.5p on the basic rate of income tax.
Chris Bryant
Let me make a very simple procedural point to the Minister. If the Government want to make dramatic changes in schemes, they should take those changes through the House fairly and properly so that Members can vote on them. Ministers have said repeatedly in the House that if the Opposition pray against a statutory instrument, including those that are relevant in this case, there will be a vote. That promise has not been fulfilled. Will the Minister make it again now?
Joseph Johnson
As I said in my opening remarks, we have had lots of votes on student finance issues, and we won them all. [Hon. Members: “What about the statutory instrument?”] The statutory instrument in question has been in force for six months. It went through all the parliamentary processes. Labour Members had plenty of opportunity to push for votes at the correct time; they are now six months too late.
When we reformed student finance in 2011, we put in place a system designed to make higher education accessible to all. Students are now supported by a system of Government-subsidised loans, which are repayable only when borrowers are earning more than £21,000 a year. Controlling the cost of higher education to the general taxpayer who has to fund public spending in this way allowed us, critically, to remove the cap on student numbers and ensure that higher education was available to all with the potential to benefit from it.
Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister rightly points out that funding higher education will involve a cost to the public purse. His own Government will be aware that 45% of all loans that are taken out are never repaid, and that after the 30-year rule period has elapsed, 70% of students have a debt outstanding. Has he worked out the figures to establish whether that money, which the Government must ultimately pay off, could be better used to reduce the cost of tuition fees up front so that more students could go to university?
Joseph Johnson
The hon. Gentleman is correct in saying that there is a Government contribution towards the loan book. It is a conscious, deliberate Government subsidy towards the skills base of the country, and towards giving more people from disadvantaged backgrounds a chance to go to university with finance being absolutely no barrier. We want people to pursue worthwhile, socially valuable careers that may not lead to high earnings—careers in social work, for instance—and we also want people to be able to take on childbearing and family-rearing responsibilities. Those are all reasons why the state will continue to make a contribution towards the cost of the loan book
Several hon. Members rose—
Joseph Johnson
I have already given way a number of times, and I am now going to make some progress.
The move to a predominantly loan-based system has enabled us to increase the level of financial support available to disadvantaged students. I am pleased to say that the application rate for 18-year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds is at an all-time high. We have also seen record numbers of black and minority-ethnic students going into higher education in recent years. There is more to be done, but we are making progress. The effectiveness of our system and our reforms has been recognised by the OECD. In September 2016, its head of education, Andreas Schleicher, said
“the UK has been able to meet rising demand for tertiary education with more resources…by finding effective ways to share the costs and benefits”.
The Government remain committed to providing a fair deal for students and ensuring that England’s universities are sustainably and properly financed. That has enabled them to maintain their world-class standing, with funding per student per degree up 25% as a result of our changes.
Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)
There are two great universities in my constituency, and they are both telling me that they face huge uncertainty because of Brexit, not least because they do not know their own fee arrangements for EU students. They are worried about not attracting those students. What is the Minister doing about that, if he wants to ensure that they are well funded tor the future?
Joseph Johnson
We have provided significant clarity in that respect. EU students will continue to be eligible for access to student support in 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19. We have provided the clarity that they need. They know that for the duration of their studies they will be able to come here, access home fee status and access student support.
The £9,000 fee cap that we set in 2012 is now worth £8,500 in real terms. If we leave it unchanged, it will be worth just £8,000 by the end of this Parliament. We simply cannot let that happen, as it would inevitably put the quality of teaching in our universities at risk and undermine the financial sustainability of the sector.
Mr Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Lab/Co-op)
I chair the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. Before tuition fees were trebled in 2012, the Committee held a session during which it interviewed the then Secretary of State for Education. He said—I quote from the report—
“When the Government’s economic policies have produced the successful outcome that we all expect, we can return to the question of how universities can be supported in a more generous way, but at the moment we face a massive financial crisis.”
The current proposals are actually less generous, not more generous. Are we still experiencing a financial crisis? If not, when will the present Minister and the current Government live up to the commitment given by that Minister?
Joseph Johnson
I am puzzled by that intervention. Our per-university, per-student funding has risen by 25% as a result of our reforms. If the hon. Gentleman wishes to read the report published last week by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, he will see that, on a per-student basis, our universities, per degree, are better funded than they have been at any point during the past 30 years.
James Cartlidge
May I pursue the logic of that point? Is it not the case that if these fee increases do not take place, we will effectively be cutting spending on universities? Should we not be fighting cuts and opposing Labour’s plan to cut spending on higher education?
Joseph Johnson
Indeed. Our system of student finance is enabling our universities to be funded sustainably. As I have said, per-student, per-degree funding is up by 25%, but we will put all that at risk if we move anywhere near Labour’s policy platform.
Mims Davies (Eastleigh) (Con)
Is it not true that Labour Members are now feigning confusion over parliamentary process on this, having previously deliberately created their own confusion? The reality on the doorsteps across Eastleigh was that Labour’s promise to deal with tuition fees included the possibility of covering bank overdrafts. Does the Minister agree that this is an empty promise from a mathematically illiterate party? People felt bank overdrafts, as well as student loans, were being dealt with.
Joseph Johnson
That goes to show the extent to which the Labour party misled the country in the run-up to the general election, and I think my hon. Friend’s constituents are owed an apology.
Let us not forget that it was a Labour Government under Prime Minister Tony Blair who sensibly put in place these legal powers, which we used some six months ago, to uprate fees in line with inflation through a negative procedure. However, under the regulations we are debating today, rather than increasing fees for everyone, we are only allowing providers to maintain their fees in line with inflation if they can demonstrate that they are using these resources well in terms of providing high-quality teaching and good outcomes for their students. Universities UK and GuildHE, the two main representative bodies that collectively represent over 170 higher education providers, have made it clear that allowing the value of fees to be maintained in real terms is essential if our providers are to continue to deliver high-quality teaching. Gordon McKenzie, the chief executive of GuildHE, made it clear that
“fees had to rise by inflation at some point and it was fairer for students if those rises were linked to an assessment of quality”,
as the Government are doing.
Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)
University education is also a route to higher earnings, worth up to a quarter of a million pounds over a lifetime. If we go forward with Labour’s policy to abolish tuition fees, it would have a damaging effect on those from disadvantaged backgrounds, as we have seen in Scotland, where there is a fall in the number of people from disadvantaged communities applying to university.
Joseph Johnson
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Labour’s policies would do the opposite of what it says they would do; they would represent a huge step backwards for social mobility in this country, they would be bad for taxpayers, who would be left shouldering the entire cost of the higher education system, and they would leave the finances of our university system in tatters.
As Professor Steve Smith, vice-chancellor of Exeter University, has said:
“The Teaching Excellence Framework presents us with an opportunity to invest in our students’ futures and the long-term economic success of our country, and to be recognised for outstanding teaching at the same time…The Government rightly wants ‘something for something’, for the economy and for students.”
Wes Streeting
I am shocked that vice-chancellors want tuition fees to rise—this comes as a complete surprise to everyone!
Vice-chancellors want fees to rise every year. Surely the Minister will be able to confirm today that tomorrow he is very likely to use powers to once again increase tuition fees to a higher level, and that once we get to 2019-20, under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, passed just before the general election, we are going to have to have votes in Parliament in order to allow and facilitate fees rises. If we are going to be doing that in the future, why not do it now?
Joseph Johnson
As I have already made clear on a number of occasions, these regulations have been in force for the last six months; they are already law—they are already applying across the sector.
Widening participation is an important policy objective for this Government. Alongside incentivising improvements in teaching, the Government’s policies on student fees have also allowed us to lift the student number cap. This is allowing more people than ever before to benefit from a university education. As I said, disadvantaged 18-year-olds are now 43% more likely to go to university than in 2009, and 52% more likely to go to a high-tariff institution. For the last application cycle, the entry rate for 18-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds is at a record high: 19.5% in 2016, compared with 13.6% in 2009. The application rate and actual number of English 18-year-old applicants is at record level in this entry cycle.
This Government have made it clear that finance should not be a barrier to going to university, which is why we have made more funding available to students. By replacing maintenance grants with loans, we have been able to increase the funding for living costs that some of the most disadvantaged students receive. It is an increase of over 10% in the current academic year, with a further 2.8% increase for 2017-18. We have worked with the Office for Fair Access to encourage universities to do more to help disadvantaged students. In 2017-18, institutions are expected to spend over £800 million on measures to improve the access and success of disadvantaged students. This is more than double the amount spent in 2009-10.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)
I am sure my hon. Friend is aware that our education exports last year exceeded those of our insurance industry, mainly fuelled by the excellence of our universities. If we do not fund them properly, we will not maintain world-class education at our universities.
Joseph Johnson
My hon. Friend is entirely right. Sustainable funding of our system is essential for our universities to continue to attract international students from around the world. Moving to the system Labour is advocating would leave their finances in tatters and be hugely damaging to the quality of teaching they can offer.
Although we are making good progress on widening participation, more can be done, and we are doing more. For example, in the latest guidance given to the Director of Fair Access we acknowledged that selective institutions, including Oxbridge and parts of the Russell Group, already do much to widen access, but we have asked the Director of Fair Access to push much harder to see that more progress is made. In the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, we are strengthening our approach to widening participation by placing an overarching duty on the Office for Students to consider the promotion of equality of opportunity in relation to access and participation in all that it does. The new Director for Fair Access will have a clear role looking across the full student lifecycle.
The hon. Member for Blackpool South (Gordon Marsden) has been chuntering about drop-out rates for several minutes. I would like to inform him that drop-out rates are lower now for all students—young, mature, disadvantaged and those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds—than when we came into office in 2010, and we are taking all the steps I have just mentioned to ensure they stay among the very lowest in the OECD. The Act also requires individual higher education providers to publish their respective student application, offer, acceptances, drop-out and attainment rates, broken down by gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic background, through the transparency duty on the Office for Students. Greater transparency will push universities into further action in this area, to build on what has already been achieved.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
Will the Minister confirm that applications from mature students were down by 18% in the last year alone? In 2011-12, applications from part-time students were down by a massive 30%.
Joseph Johnson
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, and I acknowledge the fall, but he needs to understand that there are complex reasons for it, including the rapid increase in the proportion of people entering higher education at the young age of 18. This means that there is a smaller stock of students seeking to participate in part-time and mature study later in life. We also have one of the most buoyant labour markets of any economy anywhere in the world, which increases the opportunity cost of study for people later on in life, at a time when they would otherwise be earning significant sums of money. But we recognise that there is a fall, and we are taking significant steps to address some of the financial barriers that mature students face. That is why from the next academic year we are introducing a part-time maintenance grant on the same basis as the current full-time equivalent grant.
Andrew Percy
On the point about disadvantage, before young people get to university they have to go through the FE system. Will the Minister therefore congratulate North Lincolnshire’s Conservative council, which has confirmed this week that its post-16 student bus passes will again be set at £30 for the coming year, down from £200 a year under Labour? Does this not demonstrate once again that, when it comes to students, Labour says one thing when in opposition and does something very different when in power?
Joseph Johnson
My hon. Friend makes some superb points, and he is a tireless champion of his constituents.
On the repayment of loans, our repayment system offers a fair deal to students. The current student loan system is deliberately subsidised by the taxpayer and is universally accessible to all eligible students, regardless of their personal financial circumstances or credit history. Our repayment system is based on income, not on the amount borrowed. Graduates with post-2012 loans pay back only when they are earning more than £21,000, and then only 9% of earnings above that threshold. After 30 years, all outstanding debts will be written off altogether with no detriment to the borrower, and the Student Loans Company has no recourse to their other assets. The maximum fee cap is being maintained in line with inflation in 2017-18, so it will not be increasing in real terms for anyone going to university. We believe that it is right for those who benefit most from the higher education they receive to contribute to the cost of it. We should not forget that higher education leads to an average net lifetime earnings premium that is comfortably over £100,000.
Labour continues to scaremonger about the changes to higher education. The Conservative-led coalition and this Government have introduced important reforms. The Opposition have promised to write off student debts, to cut tuition fees and to restore maintenance grants. However, they have failed to set out a credible plan on how to fund their promises, and are now shamelessly abandoning them just weeks after the general election. That is hardly surprising, given that they had not even managed to persuade key figures in the Labour party who served in their previous Government. For example, Lord Mandelson described their policy offer as “not credible” and urged Labour to
“be honest about the cost of providing higher education”.
Of course, it is not just Lord Mandelson who has commented on this. The former shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, said that his party’s failure to identify a sustainable funding mechanism was a “blot on Labour’s copybook”.
I therefore challenge the Opposition to explain how they would fund their alternative proposals on tuition fees, maintenance grants and the write-off of student debt. We estimate the annual cost of their policy on tuition fees to be £12 billion a year over the next five years of this Parliament. In addition, a one-off expenditure would be required to make good the promise of writing off historical student debt to the tune of £89.3 billion in cash costs. If Labour wanted to go the whole hog, a further £14 billion would be required to compensate graduates for historical borrowing that they had already repaid.
Make no mistake, Labour’s policy of abolishing fees would be a calamity. It would be ruinous for our world-class university sector, leading almost certainly to a fall in per-student funding of the same magnitude we saw in the decades before the introduction of top-up fees—a fall of around 40% in terms of the unit of resource. It would lead to the inevitable re-imposition of student number controls, which would cause the poorest and most disadvantaged to miss out on university, throwing social mobility into reverse. It would do all this at an eye-watering cost to the hard-working general taxpayer, whether he or she had been to university or not. Gone would be the concept of a fair sharing of the costs of university between graduates with higher-than-average lifetime earnings and society at large; taxpayers would foot the entire bill. That would be bad for universities, bad for students and bad for the taxpayer. It is no surprise that in the one place where Labour is in power, it has chosen a different approach. Last week, the Labour Government in Wales quietly increased their tuition fees for 2018-19 to £9,295 a year, making them marginally higher than the current rates in England. Labour in Wales at least knows that the party opposite’s plans are unfair to students and ruinous to universities. Perhaps it should tell the Labour party leader.
Wes Streeting
As someone who has always campaigned for wider access to higher education and who believes strongly that we should have more, rather than fewer, better educated people in our country, I welcome the fact that more students are in higher education than ever before. I am glad that the hon. Gentleman raises that point, because it brings me to the issue of Government complacency. It is not really a surprise that more young people are going to university than ever before: there are more young people than ever before. In addition to the shocking record on part-time and mature access—students in those cohorts tend to be from non-traditional and under-represented backgrounds in higher education—the Government are hugely complacent about the extent to which working-class young people are being deterred from accessing higher education by fear of tuition fees and debt.
Joseph Johnson
The hon. Gentleman has made a specious point. It is the rate for people from disadvantaged backgrounds that is 42% higher than it was in 2009-10. That has nothing to do with the number, although that is also higher.
Wes Streeting
The Minister is right that there has been progress—I do not doubt that—but once again he underlines my point about complacency. Research published by the distinguished academic Professor Claire Callender of University College London warned:
“When we compared working and upper-class students with similar GCSE results, taking account of differences in gender, ethnicity and type of school attended…a lower percentage of working-class students had applied to university…compared with those from an upper-class background…because of these fears.
Our study is an important reminder that academic achievement at school cannot adequately explain the lower proportion of students from poorer backgrounds. High fees and fear of debt play a crucial role.”
I caution the Government against complacency on this issue. They have been consistently complacent about it since they decided to treble fees. If they were not complacent, they would never have abolished the maintenance grants, which was one of the most terrible policies of the last Parliament.
It is not surprising that so many people—not just young people, but parents and grandparents—are angry about the extent to which students and graduates have been plunged into record levels of debt. It is not surprising that the issue has hit the top of the political agenda. It is not only Ministers who are to blame; university vice-chancellors should take some responsibility, too. There is scant evidence that trebling university tuition fees has led to a better quality of experience for undergraduate students. In fact, the student experience survey suggests the opposite. Students believe they get less value for money than they did before. Frankly, looking at retention rates and graduate destination data for certain courses at certain universities, those vice-chancellors who continue to award themselves inflation-busting pay increases should be ashamed.
The truth is that if people from a disadvantaged background take the plunge, go to university, take on the risk of the debt and, for whatever reason, are unable to complete the course, the cost to them is far higher than if they had never been to university—not just in terms of the debt that they still have to repay, but because on their CVs they will forever be branded failures by employers. Having been awash with cash, thanks to higher fees, in a way that the rest of the public sector has not, universities have not demonstrated the duty of care or responsibility to students that I would expect for the fees that they charge and the level of debt that results. We have to be much firmer with universities.
My final point is a broader one about where social mobility in this country is headed and the state of political debate about that. I am horrified by the number of housing cases that I deal with involving children, and the impact on their education. As I said in Communities and Local Government questions this week, I did a school visit last week, and at the end of the Q and A with a group of year 6 students, I was pulled aside by an 11-year-old boy who told me that he, his mother and his two brothers have been living in one room in a hostel, in so-called temporary accommodation, for more than a year.
I will never forget the conversation that I had in my surgery with a mum and her teenage daughter. Again, they were living in one room, in a bed and breakfast. The daughter has to do her homework under the covers at night, with a torch. She does not want to disturb her mother’s sleep, because her mother works all hours to try to make ends meet—evidently not very successfully, which is why they are stuck in poverty in a single room in a hostel.
I will certainly never forget another mother who came to me, a victim of domestic violence living in Ilford with three children, two of primary-school age and one teenager. Her daughter had admitted that she had considered taking her own life because her circumstances were so appalling. That family do not live in Ilford any more; they were moved to Harrow in west London, and then to Wolverhampton.
This is what really upsets me, as someone who grew up on a council estate and did not enjoy the experience: however bad I thought my childhood was—growing up in poverty and relying on the benefits system; living in a council flat that was not nice and to which I did not want to invite friends round to play, because it was not the sort of environment in which they would feel welcome—I realise how lucky I was now. The policies of successive Conservative Governments have led us to a point at which we are disrupting children’s education by moving them from pillar to post in temporary bed-and breakfast accommodation, with huge consequences for their education today and their life chances tomorrow.
If the Government were serious about social mobility, it would be an overriding priority running through every single Department. However, their policies and their pet projects—grammar schools, free schools and everything else—are so far removed from the reality of most people in the country, and from policies that would genuinely make a transformational difference, that they really ought to be ashamed. Theirs may be the largest party, but there is a reason for their failure to win a majority at the general election, and that is their deep detachment from the everyday lives of most people in this country.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), although I did not concur with all his points. I will address one or two of them in my speech. First, however, let me join others in congratulating the hon. Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist). She made a very touching and well-delivered speech, and it was wonderful to hear about her work in the Samaritans, which—in addition to her work as a Member of Parliament—shows that she is a true public servant. Whatever the public or the media may say, I believe that the vast majority of people who decide to enter the world of parliamentary politics do so because they want to make the world a better place, and it is clear that that is why the hon. Lady is sitting on the green Benches today. I welcome her to the House.
I think that all of us, when we remember our time at school, describe someone as our favourite teacher. Mine was a gentleman called Ken Hudson, my physics teacher. Ken was a pipe-smoking, bespectacled gentleman with a haircut like Ray Reardon’s—hon. Members may remember that he was a snooker player. Ken was definitely my inspiration, although I did not do tremendously well in physics at A-level or at college.
I remember the day we did our physics mock O-level. None of the class did particularly well. Ken walked into our classroom, stood by the blackboard, wiped it down, and just looked at us until we all went very quiet. Then he wrote across the blackboard in chalk, “The world does not owe you a living”. That has stuck with me for 37 years, and it has stuck with my children, too, because I tell them about it an awful lot—the principle that the world does not owe anyone a living. I also tell them that their parents do not owe them a living.
My son, who had just left his sixth form, had to choose whether to go to university or enter the world of work. Was he going to invest in his education? Was he going to university? If a person can provide for themselves at 18, the world does not owe them a living. At that point, it is their decision whether to invest their money—tuition fees and student accommodation away from home—and time. All that would add to my son’s debt in the future. Did he want to spend up to £30,000, £40,000 or £50,000 on his education, which might pay in the future? As we have heard, it could pay up to a quarter of million pounds over a lifetime, so that might have been a sensible choice to make. He decided not to do that, but instead to move into the world of work. Do I think it is right that he, having made that decision, should fund others who choose to go down a different route and enter higher education and university? I do not think it is right that he should have to bear that burden; surely the burden should be carried by those who benefit most from that education.
Of course other people benefit from the fact that our society is better educated, but there is a clear correlation between someone’s education and their investment in it, and the long-term return that they will see from it. A balance needs to be struck; somebody has to pay. We do not have a bottomless pit of money; that is an absolute fact. So who will pay is the key question.
I tried to intervene on the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), because I wanted to ask him a question. He has a very sensible economic perspective. At a time when we are spending £60 billion more every year than we are collecting in taxes, does he honestly feel that the £11.2 billion a year allocated to this policy in the Labour manifesto is the best way to spend that public money at this time, with all the other demands we have, including on our healthcare and our pre-18 education? Does he honestly feel that is the best use of that public money? I do not.
We have to make ends meet in this country, and therefore must choose where to allocate our resources for the best effect. [Interruption.] I am happy to take an intervention, but the point is that the Labour manifesto clearly has £250 billion of extra spending, plus £25 billion a year in infrastructure spending, which is another £125 billion. It would also nationalise the water companies and the railways. That amounts to £500 billion of extra debt. That same manifesto also says that if Labour had been in government they would have reduced the national debt over the course of this Parliament. How is that possible? How does any of this stack up? It is uncosted spending after uncosted spending.
The issue of past student debt was not in the manifesto, of course, but what the Leader of the Opposition said about that is clear, and not every party commitment needs to be in the manifesto for people to have a reasonable degree of expectation that it will be delivered. He said:
“I will deal with those already burdened with student debt.”
That was a clear commitment. So on top of that £500 billion, there is another £111 billion—uncosted debt after uncosted debt. That is the reality, and we cannot carry on like that. We must not go back to the 1970s, which is when I grew up; my household had uncollected rubbish and the TV used to go off at 10 o’clock. I am old enough to remember that, and we will return to it if we do not maintain a sensible economic policy.
It is wrong to think that we on this side of the House are not worried about student debt. Of course I am worried about student debt—both that of the many students across the country, and potentially that of my children, as I have three more children, some of whom might choose to go to university. We should be talking about constructive ways of allowing students to go through university and benefit from higher education without incurring so much debt. One way of doing so would be to have shorter courses. My daughter is looking at a psychology course.
Joseph Johnson
My hon. Friend will be pleased to know that the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, enacted on the last day of the last Session, makes it possible for universities to offer shorter courses, such as two-year degrees.
Kevin Hollinrake
That is an example of ideas in action, and it is tremendous news. I should have been following that more closely, but—[Interruption.] I see that you want me to conclude, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I will make a couple of quick points, if I may.
We should look at the US system, with its modular courses. Students can also live closer to home and not incur the accommodation and living costs involved in moving away. There are ways to reduce the financial impact on students, but overall this is about choice and who pays for those choices. I believe the burden of the cost should be borne by those who benefit from the education.