NHS Bursary

Debate between Clive Lewis and Paul Scully

Monday 11th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Paul Scully]

Well, I think a lot of it is down to affordability. [Interruption.] No, there is a big difference. Someone might have an amount of £50,000 or something like that, for example, but it is about the repayment. Whether someone is paying £5 or £50 a month, that is the figure that lenders will look at to work out whether they can afford to repay the loan. As I said right at the beginning, that top line figure is not the crucial one. The crucial one is actually the amount that someone will pay out of their salary each and every month.

Looking at the current case and at positions that are particular to nurses, we have talked about the fact some people going into the nursing profession may already have a degree and are doing a second one. There are mature students. The average age of those applying to study is about 28 or 29. I believe I have covered my take on people’s concerns about the diversity of the workforce changing.

Under the current rules, people cannot usually access the student loans system if they have already done a degree to the same level. The view of the Council of Deans of Health is that the Government should make those courses exempt from that rule. I will be interested to hear what the Minister says about whether that is the case. If it is, in the new system, people would be able to access student loans if they wanted to—that would be an equivalent or lower qualification exemption. As repayment amounts are based on salary and not on the total loan, the amount repaid would be the same whether someone has one or two loans. Effectively, that makes it a graduate contribution, not a traditional loan. The system is slightly different from a graduate tax, which was discussed a few years ago, because it is finite—it finishes after 30 years, and a graduate tax, as we might have had under other suggestions, would have carried on going past a graduate’s retirement. As I said to the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), the introduction of tuition fees and loans for other degree courses has not led to a drop in applications and has not affected the diversity of applicants.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

One of the chief concerns that many student nurses have when listening to these proposals is that, unlike many other students who can take second jobs to help pay back their student loan, student nurses are sometimes working up to 40 hours a week for the NHS. They have no opportunity to make any other money to be able to pay off a student loan, but that is not taken into account. Student nurses are very different from any other group of students, which is not taken into account by the proposal.

[Paul Scully]

The hon. Gentleman has not listened to what I have said, because the whole point about the loan system is that the loans will not kick in until after a student has graduated, so the repayments will not start until that point. Student nurses will not be making any repayments while they are studying and doing those placements, but I absolutely take the point that nursing is a very different proposition from a normal degree in so much as placements take up 37 or 38 hours a week and beyond, which is a considerable strain on nurses.