Intergenerational Fairness in Government Policy

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 26th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, first I thank my noble friend Lady Smith for introducing the debate. It is a speech I do not think I would have cared to try. Next, I have to slightly rap my noble friend Lord Storey across the knuckles. Not everybody in this debate has got their bus pass yet. One or two of us still have a wee bit of time to go.

Having said that, I wish to talk about the student experience. The first time I spoke about that in a meaningful way was over a quarter of a century ago, when I was able to state that I was talking about it as the person who had the most recent experience of that situation. If it was not 1990, it was 1991, when we first started discussing the process that removed the grant system, then the personal maintenance loan. Since then, we have been moving away from a system that is now seen to be something of a golden age. That golden age has probably become slightly more golden with the glow of our looking back at it. I remember students complaining that they did not have enough grant to live on—another pretty steady experience back then. That was a well-worn path, even by the time I arrived in the early 1980s.

So, what have we got here? Students going through university today perceive that they are being unfairly treated. Noble Lords can argue about that perception until the cows come home, but the fact is that it is there. We have effectively “monetised”—I searched long and hard for the expression—the value of the university experience by having this great burden of debt. Whether that is the reality, whether students are expected to pay it off or do anything with it, it is still there. It has a monetary value, which means the experience of being at university has become a sort of money, cashback, return, value-for-investment process, which was not there a few years ago. A debt of £50,000 has been mentioned, but the figures change, along with the number of people currently taking higher education degrees compared with the past. I find it rather odd that people doing polytechnic degrees were not counted in half the statistics I looked at. Good old-fashioned educational snob value; there we are.

However, we have this idea of debt going through—and what do we get back from it? That means the entire education process is being looked at in a slightly different way. Anybody taking an arts course now says, “I don’t get enough hours of contact. I’m paying all this money, so why don’t I get the hours”? As an arts student, I was given guidance and lots of books, then told to go away, study, do the work, come back and see where I made mistakes and where I could improve. Are students being taken through it in a step-by-step process? They think, “We’re paying for it. We should get some more help”.

Perhaps we need to look at this in a slightly different way. The idea of what students are getting seems to be changing rapidly, as is the role of the parents supporting those students—the bank of mum and dad, as has been referred to. They are asking what their child should get with all this debt, regardless of whether they are actually going to pay it back or not. We need to look at that. The perception of what is happening is very important, because as we all know, perception becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes reality, regardless of how flimsy the foundation is. That is the process; people behave in reaction to that knowledge and reality. If, as seems to be going on right now, people are voting against something because it is terribly unfair, and we say we will change it—I put that promise right up there with free beer for everybody.

However, if that is what people are doing, that is the way they get in. It distorts the argument. We have to look at what they are going to get out of the experience and package it differently. We may well have to change that burden of debt from being an individual thing to a societal thing once more. I cannot see any solution other than some form of graduate tax, because the burden will get bigger and the perception—you will not be able to write it off or do anything with it—will get bigger. We will have to repackage it. Is that not what finance does all the time? I suggest we start doing the same thing quite quickly.

Finally, on the idea of perception, I want to raise another issue, which may be outside the debate. Special educational needs in universities is now much more a problem of the institutions themselves. When we considered the Higher Education and Research Bill, I tried to see whether we could get a good guide to the job of the universities when dealing with the lower levels of this issue. I am still waiting for a good answer. I am still waiting for somebody to counter the argument that we should let the courts sort out universities’ level of responsibility. When we are looking at the idea of perception, I hope that such issues can be included in the thinking. I hope I will not have to bring that subject back to this House.