Universities: Financial Sustainability

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Chris Skidmore]

I entirely agree. I am proud to be a member of the Government who reduced the student number cap between 2012 and 2015, and eventually abolished it in 2016, allowing a record number of students to access higher education. We know that, going into the 2020s, we will need a knowledge-based economy, so it is right that we allow more people the opportunity to succeed in their ambition to achieve a degree. Abolishing student finance by looking at fee levels would simply give away a fee freeze to the children of millionaires while capping the number of students who could attend university.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Minister has said that the Government will not bail out universities in financial difficulties, yet virtually his first act as Universities Minister was to take through Parliament a 20% increase in tuition fees, albeit just for accelerated degrees at this stage. Can he reassure the House that he has no plans to allow other degrees to see a 20% hike in tuition fees as a result of the financial problems currently facing universities?

[Chris Skidmore]

I welcome the measures we are putting in place to increase course innovation and flexibility within the HE sector. I passionately believe that that is the future and where we need to go. People may need to train and retrain across the course of their lives, so we will need course provision that allows people to access the HE market at every stage of their lives, right the way through their 20s and 30s. Two-year degrees are not a silver bullet—in fact, they were put forward in a Labour party amendment to the Higher Education and Research Act—but we have tried to ensure that they open up the market and we have encouraged more HE providers to take up two-year degrees. At the moment, they have been capped by the financial ability or the lack of financial ability to do so. Ultimately, it is £22,000 for a degree as opposed to £27,000. It is not necessarily an increase in fees; it provides people with an opportunity to study at a time of their choosing.