Higher Education (England) Regulations

Emma Hardy Excerpts

Wednesday 13th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. There are two groups of people who miss out in Scotland. We know what no fees would mean; we only have to look north of the border. In the interests of evidence-based policy, I encourage Labour Members and the Labour party to actually look at the impact of what they are proposing. Go to Scotland. See whether disadvantaged young people from the poorest families have more or less chance to go university in a country where there are no fees. They have less chance. In fact, young people overall have less chance of going to university in Scotland. I am not putting some kind of hypothesis before the House; this is a simple fact. It is a consequence of the Labour party policy of no fees.

[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Justine Greening]

I will give way to the hon. Lady. Unlike Labour Members, I am quite happy to take interventions.

[Emma Hardy]

In the interests of providing evidence and discussing evidence-based education policy, which I am very keen to do, I have to ask the right hon. Lady whether she agrees that we have seen a reduction in the number of part-time students attending university and a reduction in the number of mature students. Part-time and mature students predominantly come from more economically deprived backgrounds, so they are missing out on their chance to attend university.

[Justine Greening]

I am pleased the hon. Lady accepts that there are more young people going to university. A number of different factors are involved when it comes to mature students. We will be providing more support for mature students, but part of the decline is due to the fact that more young people are going to university in the first place, so there is simply a smaller cohort of mature students.

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[Robert Halfon]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right on that, and I was pleased to visit her excellent local college when I was in my previous role. Of course she is right to say that we need a UCAS for apprenticeships and the skills system. That was in the Conservative manifesto and I believe the Government are working hard to achieve it.

Over the summer, the issue of vice-chancellors’ pay has consistently been in the headlines, and we need to examine the salaries of the senior management of universities. It cannot be right that 55 universities are paying their vice-chancellors more than £300,000 and yet a recent survey found that just 35% of students believe their higher education experience represented “good” or “very good” value for money. I am worried about the seemingly Marie Antoinette approach taken by some vice-chancellors, who are living in their gilded palaces and saying, “Let the students eat cake”, as they receive almost obscene amounts of pay.

[Emma Hardy]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the salaries of not only some vice-chancellors, but some chief executive officers of academy chains and multi-academy trusts in this country are obscene, at a time when our education system is seeing so many cuts and schools are struggling so badly? Does he agree that we should also be looking at the obscene rates of pay in these academy chains?

[Robert Halfon]

We need to look at this across the board to make sure that salaries are related to performance and are seen as fair. I am not against high salaries, but what we have seen with some of these vice-chancellors, although not all, is pretty awful. As I say, their Marie Antoinette response to this just shows that they are completely out of touch with what is going on with a struggling economy, struggling students and so on. That is why I support the recent comments by the Universities Minister on pay and the restrictions the Government have proposed.

In my role as Chair of the Education Committee, I look forward to bringing greater scrutiny to the issue of pay and the wider value-for-money question. The hon. Lady is a new, valued member of the Committee, and I am pleased that one of the first areas the Committee will look at is the extent to which students are gaining a high-quality education and accessing graduate-level jobs. We will look at the evidence on how universities are currently spending the £9,000 and how an extra £250 would improve—or not—the experiences and outcomes of students.

Value for money must also be linked to interest rates. Not only are students graduating from university with greater debt than ever before, but they are facing substantially more interest on their loans. The interest rate of 6.1% is just too high; with the increase it will be more than 24 times the official Bank of England base rate. It has to be reviewed and it must be lowered, and it should be much more comparable to what happens in other countries. As the OECD highlights, our interest rate is one of the highest in western Europe, overburdening our students.

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[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

I should start by declaring an interest: I am still paying off my student loans. Student fees will always be an emotive issue, but I believe that everybody on both sides of the House wants the same outcome. We all want an education system that allows every child to reach their potential and equips citizens for life and work in our country.

Some Members argued that the staggering debt that students leave university with is notional, but considering that I have been paying mine off for 15 years, I can assure them that it does not feel notional. It feels very real indeed, and I am sure it feels very real for everybody else in the UK who is still paying off their student debt in the same situation.

I am mindful that we are discussing heaping debt on people who might never earn enough money to pay it off, yet every one of us earns nearly three times the national average salary. During my two maternity leaves, I saw my student debt increase each year because the interest kept being added while I was not earning enough money to pay it off. For people who have not been on maternity leave, I can tell them that it is financially difficult, and people can struggle. It is incredibly demotivating and demoralising to see a debt from going to university and trying to get on in life constantly increasing. I assure the House that my constituents, too, feel demoralised at seeing their debt increase. Members might say, “It doesn’t matter. If they don’t earn more than £21,000, so what? They will never pay it off,” but if they got a statement each month telling them that the money they owed was going up and up, that would make them feel demoralised, dejected and fed up with their life.

I am looking forward to working with the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), who is unfortunately no longer in his place, on the Education Committee, and I agree with him that the interest rates are appalling. How can it be justifiable that they are so much higher than the Bank of England base rate? To show that the unfairness of the high interest rates is even worse than that, someone contacted me the other day and said, “Do you realise that they start adding interest to student loans from the moment you start university?” Students’ debts increase while they are still studying at university—they have not even graduated. How is that fair or justifiable?

One of the best things we can do to help universities with funding—I hope the Minister takes this on board—is to encourage overseas students to come to our country and pay for our university education. I hope the reality of our universities’ funding problems will break through Conservative Members’ ideological aversion to overseas students coming here.

I am concerned about the reduction in the number of part-time and mature students. I believe in lifelong learning. I think everybody should have the opportunity to go to university at a time that suits them. Let us be honest: it is often women with caring responsibilities who study part-time at university. They will miss out, and I think that is a travesty. We should look at that issue.

I am sorry, but I do not buy the idea that more people from deprived backgrounds are going to university and we have tuition fees, so having tuition fees mean that more people from deprived backgrounds go to university. That is rubbish; that is correlation, not causation. The Government cannot say that increasing tuition fees means that more people from deprived backgrounds go to university. That is total nonsense.

Let us be honest: the current model of ever-increasing tuition fees and student loans does not work for students or our universities. Because so little is repaid, I do not believe it works for the Treasury either. It is time to consign tuition fees to the same bin the Government dumped their election manifesto in.