Student Loans Company
Debate between Dennis Skinner and Lord Johnson of Marylebone(7 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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Joseph Johnson
The student loan product is heavily subsidised overall. Around 45% of loans are consciously written off by the Government as a deliberate investment in the country’s skills base. We do not want any financial barriers to access, so we make the money available on very favourable terms. The interest rate is a means of ensuring that graduates who go on to have higher than average lifetime earnings make a contribution towards the overall cost and sustainability of higher education, ensuring that it continues to drive access and widen participation systematically across the piece.
Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)
Is the Minister aware that this is not subsidised enough? There is only one solution and it stares us in the face every time he opens his mouth: let us have free education like we used to have, from the cradle to the grave.
Joseph Johnson
The thing is that our system of student finance has enabled far, far more people to go to university than the kind of system that the hon. Gentleman advocates. In the 1950s and 1960s, when others in this House were thinking about whether to go to university, a far smaller proportion of each cohort of 18 to 19-year-olds was given the chance to do so. Now almost 46% of 18 and 19-year-olds get a chance to go to university, and that is a world away from the situation when we had an entirely state-funded higher education system, which meant that it was really just the preserve of a narrow elite.