Higher and Further Education

David Lammy Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and add:

“congratulates all those who have recently achieved their educational qualifications; notes the number of full-time higher education students in 2012 is expected to be higher than in any year under the previous administration; believes that the pupil premium, which is designed to raise the attainment of pupils from low-income households, represents a powerful mechanism for widening participation in higher education; welcomes the increased spending on widening participation in higher education, including the higher maintenance grants, the National Scholarship Programme and the extension of tuition loans to part-time students; further notes the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ recent finding that the new student finance system ‘is actually more progressive than its predecessor: the poorest 29 per cent of graduates will be better off under the new system’; supports the extra information provided to prospective students through the student finance tour and the Key Information Set; further supports the efforts being made to ensure the best possible match between students and institutions, with one-quarter of all undergraduate places removed from centralised number controls; and congratulates the Government for working with employers to deliver an unprecedented increase in apprenticeships, with 800,000 new starts since September 2010.”

I welcome this opportunity to debate our reforms to higher and further education. It is the right time to have this debate, as hundreds of thousands of students are starting at university. We congratulate them on their achievement and wish them well at university. We also welcome this opportunity to set out our policies. I will describe our approach to higher education and my excellent new colleague, the Under-Secretary of State for Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock), will set out our approach to training and further education.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Willetts]

In a moment.

Of course, it is also right to scrutinise the Opposition’s policies, as set out in the motion. I will turn to the previous Minister for universities, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), in a moment. I hope he will accept that under the inevitable partisanship of these exchanges, we should remind ourselves that all three political parties, faced with the dilemma of how to finance higher education in the future, have concluded that the right way forward is to have no up-front payments by students, but instead to have a graduate repayment scheme, paid for through pay-as-you-earn and incorporating the best features of a graduate income tax. All three parties, when faced with the responsibilities of Government, have reached the same decision.

[Mr Lammy]

The right hon. Gentleman said that he welcomed the debate and thought that it had come at an opportune moment. When does he intend to publish the White Paper and bring forward legislation in this area?

[Mr Willetts]

We have published our White Paper and have set out our proposals in several consultation documents. We are implementing those proposals step by step.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss these important issues. Indeed, it is some time since the House had the opportunity to consider them.

Given that I preceded the Minister for Universities and Science, it is probably right to begin by welcoming some of the moves he has made, particularly on student contact hours, which were a growing concern during our period in office, on employment outcomes, the relevance of which has become even more heightened, given the nature of the economy, and, importantly, in ring-fencing the science budget. However, this debate is important also because of where this country stands economically. We are in a second recession in as many years. Unemployment is at an all-time high among graduates and is seriously worrying among non-graduates. Under the circumstances, one would expect university to be a place where young people go to shelter and stay. Indeed, many of the debates that we are having in this House—and that we shall rightly continue to have—go to the heart of whether we can begin to see serious growth in our economies. We will not see that growth unless we have university students coming out and getting jobs, and unless we can be convinced and reassured that our universities will remain world class.

However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) outlined in opening for the Opposition, the backdrop for higher education is one of serious concerns and confusion about core and margin and AAB, as well as confusion in the lead-up to reaching the fee agreement. When I pressed the Minister on when we would see the legislation that he promised almost two years ago, he was unable to give us a date. Against that backdrop, universities are, quite rightly, hugely worried about their future. This is a serious issue, and the Minister ought to have demonstrated more concern about the fact that students are turning away from higher education in the way that they are.

The Minister will know that, before the Labour Government came to power, there were parts of Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff and London in which more young people were going to prison than were going to university. My constituency was one such area. I am proud that, during our period in office, constituencies such as mine saw the numbers of people going to university quadruple, and that the number of young people from right across the country going to the Russell group universities trebled in that period. Participation rates were between 10% and 12% when I was going to university in the late 1980s, but the Labour Government achieved a rise in the rate to 43%, which represents a 44% increase in the number of entrants. That is now being put in jeopardy, and that should be a matter of concern if we want to compete properly, to have a growth economy and to see the kind of prospects for our country over the next few years that we clearly need to see.

Higher education contributes £59 billion a year to the UK economy, making it a hugely important sector. Many hon. Members who have raised the issue of London Metropolitan university have voiced their serious concerns about Britain’s reputation. There might be an assumption that Britain is open for business, and that we want to be world class and to be at the centre of higher education in the world, but the message that the Government are repeatedly sending out is that none of those is the case.

The Minister’s description of higher fees and of what he suspected took place under the Labour Government does not accord with my understanding of the situation. We certainly had absolutely no plans to strip out 80% of the teaching budget. That this Government are doing so is a scandal. There is no country in the civilised world that does not acknowledge the importance of the state’s contribution to higher education. It is only this Government who have decided to withdraw entirely from that area. It is no wonder that we have seen a drop in applications for humanities and languages this year.

That disastrous Government policy sits alongside the huge escalation in fees to £9,000—a trebling of the figure. For an average family, with combined earnings of £42,000—in effect, the earnings of a postman and a nurse—and unable to get a grant, £9,000 is just too much. How are they to find that amount? That is the question on the table, but the Minister has not answered it. Numbers are falling and we are losing our world-class status. I am sorry to say that, on his watch, a world-class educational sector in this country is losing its way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gordon Birtwistle]

A number of members of the Labour party in Burnley were saying to the young people of Burnley, and convincing them, that they would have to find the money up front. That was obviously not the case, so I told them that they would not have to pay the money up front, that the money would be given to them up front and that no repayments would have to be made until they were earning £21,000. They then asked how much they would have to pay when they were earning £22,000, which is a gross salary of £1,850 a month. When they are on that income, their repayment to the taxpayer for funding their education at university will be £8 a month. When I asked them whether they would mind paying back £8 a month if they had a salary of £1,850 they said, “Of course not. We understood that it would be lots more than that.” I then asked them to assume that they were on a salary of £25,000, which is a substantial salary in Burnley, and so would be collecting more than £2,000 a month. When I asked whether they would then object to paying back £30 a month to the taxpayer who had funded their education at university I was again told, “Well of course not, but that is not what we have been told. That is not the understanding that we have. So we are happy to do it.” I even got the student union rep at the university of central Lancashire to say, “That is far better than what we have now.” The young people of Burnley are getting a better deal now than they had before, and that convinced me to support the proposals in the Bill.

I also compared the number of students who go to university with the total number of students who leave school. About 40% go to university, which means that 60% do not. So I looked at the prospects for those young people who do not go to university—I am thinking of the apprenticeship scheme. I was an apprentice engineer in 1958. Over the past 25 years, various Governments, particularly the last one, took the decision to destroy apprenticeships. They said that they did not need apprenticeships, that they would pray and bow to the City and the finance sector, so never mind the manufacturing sector—let it go. The Indians and Chinese could do the manufacturing and we would just make money out of the finance sector. We all saw what happened to the finance sector: it caught a cold and we all got pneumonia.

We have to support manufacturing, so the Government have invested in 800,000 young people who are now apprentices. Many of them are going to university but are being funded by the companies that they work for, which means that they are getting degrees and have a job, but do not have any debt. That is the kind of forward thinking that the Government should demonstrate and that is what we have had.

[Mr Lammy]

I welcome what the hon. Gentleman has said about apprenticeships, but does he share my concern that we have too many apprenticeships that are for less than six months and many apprenticeships in parts of retail that are not like the apprenticeships he described, such as the one he went on?

[Gordon Birtwistle]

I have some sympathy with that comment, because I believe that apprenticeships should be for a real job and I agree that young people should not be taken on on short-term contracts and called apprentices. I have met many young people in Burnley who are on real apprenticeships in engineering, distribution, motor mechanics and so on and they are doing very well out of it.

I also want to comment on the £350 million that the Government are putting in to university technical colleges. Technical colleges are another thing of the past—people who did not go to grammar school but to the secondary modern school could manage to get to a technical college halfway through. Technical colleges trained people to go and do a job in industry, but we gave up on them in the 1960s. They are now coming back and we will have 32 university technical colleges.

Young people will be able to leave secondary school at 14 and be trained at the colleges for a real job, doing subjects into which the businesses in the area will have input. Those companies are now involved with the university technical colleges, which are delivering young people into the jobs that this country needs. We are desperate for engineers and scientists, whereas there are more people with law degrees stacking shelves in supermarkets than doing anything else. We need to start making things and training people to do the jobs of the future and that is what the university technical colleges will do with young people. If we take the colleges, together with the apprenticeships and the young people who go to university, we have a good deal.

I do not see the arguments against our approach and what I have heard from the Minister tonight suggests that the funding system proposed by the Opposition is equal to the previous funding system, which has bankrupted the country. I do not want to go back to those days. I want real jobs, for real young people studying at university, and the delivery of everything else that goes with that.