Higher Education Funding
Debate between Brian Binley and Greg Clark(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)
I pay tribute to my colleague the Chairman of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), not just for the report, but in recognition of all the years during which we have worked together on the Committee, with me as his would-be vice-Chairman. I believe that I speak as the longest-serving member of the Committee: I have been a member for nine years, and the grey hairs can attest to that record. I also thank all the other Committee members with whom I have worked during those nine years. It has been a fascinating experience.
I hope that I may wander off the main topic of the debate just a little—and it will only be a little. It is about time we saw Select Committee membership as an alternative career choice in the House of Commons. I hope that the importance of Select Committees will be enhanced, because, if that does nothing else, it may end what I consider to be the dangers of patriotism and patronage that apply in this place. I hope that that remark has been recorded, and will be picked up somewhere.
Greg Clark
I know that my hon. Friend—and he has been a friend for many years—is a considerable patriot. I cannot imagine that he was deprecating patriotism.
Mr Binley
No, not patriotism; I meant patronage, and I am glad that my right hon. Friend has pointed that out. I will now continue to speak according to the terms of the motion, Mr Deputy Speaker, which I am sure will delight you.
My colleague—indeed, I shall use the term “hon. Friend”—the Chairman of the Committee said that he would concentrate on wider issues than that of the money itself. I want to concentrate on the issue of the resource accounting and budgeting charge, the money and the black hole that the charge is producing for future generations.
Greg Clark
Those funds are available through the access regulator to be invested in the best way. Social progress has been made and people from my background now have the chance to go to university in increasing numbers. To rob universities and our young people of that help and assistance is an extraordinary suggestion from the Labour party.
For what purpose? It would reduce the payments not for poorer graduates but for the very richest. Those who pay off the £9,000 loans in full would be the only beneficiaries. I am talking about the richest 20% of earners, who would pay off their loans on average 28 years after graduation, when they are in middle age, and when they are earning on average £78,000, according to a think-tank. Ironically, this debate has been largely focused on the concerns that too high a proportion of loans is notionally projected to be written off, yet the Opposition want to write off 100% of loans over £6,000 for all graduates, even the ones who can comfortably pay.
I am not instinctively a partisan politician, and I believe it is strongly in our interest that policy questions about our universities should be, wherever possible, rooted in consensus and stability. That was the intention behind the Browne review, which the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) referred to, and which the previous Government set up. My right hon. Friend the Member for Havant implemented that dispassionate and thorough report. I hope that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill will reflect on the ever more obvious success of the system, get behind it and drop his temptation to engage in a stunt that would plunge the financing of higher education into chaos.
Greg Clark
I am just about to conclude.
If the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill does get behind the system, in the same spirit, he will attract praise, not opprobrium, from those on the Government Benches—I am sure that my right hon. Friend would be generous in acknowledging that—and he will earn the respect of the sector, which values the stability and the sustainability that we now have in the financing of higher education in this country.
Infrastructure
Debate between Brian Binley and Greg Clark(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Greg Clark
I should have thought that in two and a half years the hon. Lady would have learned the lesson from that. The deficit that Labour was running was greater than the deficit in any other G7 country. We needed to sort that out, and to create confidence in our economy. If Labour Members have not learned the lesson after two and a half years, what hope is there for the future?
The economic arguments advanced from the Opposition Benches sometimes purport to draw on the wisdom of John Maynard Keynes, but Keynes recommended that Governments should run a surplus in the good times, enabling spending, especially on infrastructure, to take place in the lean years.
Greg Clark
Our capital revenue spending would have been determined by a visit to the International Monetary Fund if we had followed the course set by the Opposition.
In the years prior to the financial crisis the previous Government ran the biggest structural deficit in the G7. Despite the denials of the shadow Chancellor, that is a matter of record, and the fact that he refuses to acknowledge what has now been made very clear merits an apology.
One of the most enduring mysteries of the 13 years in which Labour was in office is what they did with the money. We would think that 13 years in which they spent, taxed and borrowed like no peacetime Government before would at least have left us with an infrastructure that we could have been proud of and that would have been world-beating.