Higher Education Policy

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Denham]

That argument is worthy of further examination, and I assure the hon. Gentleman that I will be dealing with it in due course, at—I hope—not too much length. It gets worse.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Denham]

Ministers have consistently claimed that fees above £6,000 will be allowed only if tough access agreements are in place. Before I say more about that, however, I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn).

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am sure my right hon. Friend realises that the universities that have not raised their fees to £9,000, such as my own London Metropolitan university, are giving themselves a large financial problem which is resulting—in the case of the London Met—in the loss of possibly as many as 10,000 student places over the next three years, a large number of redundancies, and a loss of access to higher education for students from working-class backgrounds. That is the perverse effect of the Government’s strategy of effectively trying to privatise higher education.

[Mr Denham]

My hon. Friend has underlined a point that I have already made. Individual institutions have had to make their own choices, but this was a system in which almost every incentive for the vast majority of institutions was to raise fees, and there were almost no incentives to lower them. Given the number of professors of game theory in the universities of England, one would have thought that Ministers could have got a few together and asked them, “What will you do, in practice, if we introduce a system like this?” Every single one of them would have replied, “We will make the fees as high as we possibly can.” The Minister and the Secretary of State are just about the only people with any connection to higher education who are surprised by what has happened.

Of course, Ministers have consistently claimed that fees above £6,000 will be allowed only if tough access agreements are in place. When Cambridge university announced it wanted a fee of £9,000 per year, the Deputy Prime Minister—the man who promised no fee increases—exploded, stating:

“They can say what they like. They can’t charge £9,000 unless they’re given permission to do so. And they’re only going to be given permission to do so if they can prove that they can dramatically increase the number of people from poorer and disadvantaged backgrounds who presently aren’t going to Oxford and Cambridge.”

That sounded pretty clear, but what has Cambridge actually proposed? Its current access target under the current fees policy is to reach 60% to 63% of state school students—not, we should note, poorer or disadvantaged state school students, just any state school students including those from selective schools. What has it proposed in the new access agreement? It has proposed that the target should be not 60% to 63% of state school students, but 61% to 63% of state school students. As the Financial Times put it:

“Cambridge basically reckons it can triple student fees and placate the Government by adjusting the bottom of its target range for state school pupils by one percentage point.”

Does anybody in this House believe that Cambridge will not be allowed to charge £9,000?

The Secretary of State’s guidance to the Office for Fair Access did not request that OFFA take into account past performance on benchmarks or widening participation, nor could it legally have done so. It will be many years, at best, before OFFA can possibly judge whether the new access agreements have been complied with and made any difference to access. Will the Minister for Universities and Science tell the House today how long he expects it to be before OFFA could feasibly sanction any university for failure to comply?

It is obvious that these bungling Ministers thought OFFA had powers it simply did not have. When The Times asked Sir Martin Harris, the director of OFFA, whether Ministers had been aware of his limited powers when plans to treble the cap on fees were approved by Parliament, he replied:

“I think that the powers of OFFA became clearer as this debate went on.”

That is a tremendously polite way of saying, “They didn’t understand what they were talking about,” and he went on to say, for the avoidance of doubt:

“It is very important that everybody understands that OFFA is not a fee regulator.”

Tory peers made sure of that in 2004. In another place, they passed amendments that ensured that Labour’s fees legislation could not allow the very interference that the Tory-led Government are now threatening.

Of course, in theory OFFA can reject an access scheme, but only a stupid and incompetent vice-chancellor would run that risk. Universities just need a rational plan for school outreach work, and bursaries or fee waivers for some students; if they get that right, OFFA’s powers to limit fees to £6,000 collapse, and the university is free to charge up to £9,000. That is the second reason why £9,000 is becoming the norm, not the exception.

The cynical talk of tough access agreements is raising false hopes among students, and now the finances are unravelling. The permanent secretary at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills recently appeared in front of the Public Accounts Committee, and he was asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) about the consequences of fees higher than an average of £7,500. She asked:

“You have a gap, haven’t you, that you are going to have to plug”?

The permanent secretary replied: “Yes.”

The Secretary of State has already made it absolutely clear how he will respond. He told the Higher Education Funding Council for England conference:

“Government essentially has two ways of dealing financially with collective over-pricing: either cutting the teaching grant or student numbers.”

So there will be more cuts in teaching grant, or even more cuts in student numbers beyond the cut of 20,000 from the total Labour planned for September 2010 and the number he will allow in 2012-13.

Frankly, the Government are all over the place on this. On the one hand the permanent secretary says there is a problem, and the Secretary of State says he may cut student numbers or the teaching grant. On the other, he says there is not a black hole. The House of Commons Library has published estimates of the financial shortfall at average fee levels above £7,500. Ministers say they do not recognise the Library figures, so will the Minister guarantee to the House today that the average fee will be no more than the £7,500 first promised? If he cannot guarantee that, will he tell the House what the black hole will be, and how he is going to balance the budget?

That is not the only question about finances, because the whole fiasco has been driven by the Secretary of State’s claim that he needed to sacrifice higher education to cut the budget deficit. There are increasing concerns that the policy will not save any public money. The cut in teaching grant has to be set against the massive increase in the level of student debt that has to be written off because of loans that will never be repaid. London Economics, million+ and the Higher Education Policy Institute are among the organisations that have pointed out that quite small changes in assumptions about future graduate earnings or the rate of non-repayment would wipe out any savings. Yesterday, the director of the Office for Budget Responsibility wrote to me confirming that the OBR will re-examine the Government’s assumptions once all the universities have set their fees.

As it has become increasingly clear that fees approaching £9,000 will be the norm, Ministers have constantly threatened to enact new laws to stop them. In their guidance to the Office for Fair Access, these Ministers said that

“if the sector as a whole appeared to be clustering their charges at the upper end of what is legally possible, and thereby increasing the pressure on public funds, we will have to reconsider what powers are available, including changes to legislation, to ensure there is differentiation in charges.”

They have talked of cutting all university places by 5% to 10% and then auctioning them off to the lowest bidder, including foreign-owned private universities. They have also talked of strengthening OFFA’s legal powers, but part of this disgraceful situation is that they make threats but they will not publish any details.

So I ask the Secretary of State and the Minister for Universities and Science whether, having said that they are prepared to legislate to stop universities charging high fees, they will stop hiding behind weasel words and tell us what they actually propose to do. Will there be an auction of student places? Is OFFA going to be given powers to set fees or impose quotas for students from different backgrounds? There are people on both sides of the House who would like to have the answer to that question. Does the Minister have any idea how he would get such a policy through the House of Lords, given that the Lords insisted on explicitly limiting OFFA’s powers in 2004? It really is not good enough for the Secretary of State and his Minister to keep making it up as they go along.

The Minister said that he would double the level of student loans available for study at private universities and he has made it clear that he wants more competition from private universities, but he has not set out how they will be regulated, how quality will be maintained or how the problem of fraud, which is being investigated by congressional committees in the USA, will be avoided—this involves the same companies he wants to expand their activities here. Once again, veiled threats are being made in panic as Ministers lose control of the system, but we are being given no details, no substance and no openness. It is not good enough to keep this House, future students and universities in the dark about what they plan to do.

Let me turn now to another aspect of Government policy that is becoming clear. The Secretary of State and his Minister plan to force tens of thousands of students from squeezed-middle homes to pay a levy to cut the fees of other students, often those from similar backgrounds. In a typical access scheme—hon. Members can go on websites to look at these—a student with two working parents both on £24,000 a year will pay a full £27,000 a year in fees, but that will include a £3,000 levy to cut the fees of the student from next door with one working parent on £24,000 a year. So two graduates with the same degree from the same university starting the same job will start their working life with as much as a £9,000 difference in their level of debt. How many of our constituents will think that having two hard-working parents should be a disadvantage that stays with someone for 30 years?

--- Later in debate ---

[Tristram Hunt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I am happy to look at that. Personally, I am no fan of the graduate tax.

I, too, am new here, but as I understand it, what happens in this place and in government is that people come up with ideas and then there is a Green Paper, a White Paper, some debate, a decision, and then a policy enactment. What we have here is the imposition of an arbitrary fee level, followed by the scurrying around for a justification, which we have seen over recent months, to make the figures add up.

The Government’s policy is driven by ideology. It is the ghost of Keith Joseph coming back to life. It is neo-liberalism rather than Liberal Democrat politics. However, let us be generous for a minute and argue, as the confused Minister for Universities and Science tried to, that some of it is driven by a desire for deficit reduction. We will leave aside for a second the fact that for every £1 million invested in universities £2.5 million comes back, and we will leave aside the fact, mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), that the only other country deciding to slash spending on universities and science during the recession is Romania. Clearly Ministers are using the Romanian model, when we thought they were interested in a knowledge-driven economy.

If deficit reduction is the strategy, why do the sums not add up? Why will the Government’s plans cost more, not less, over the coming years? Because the Government have got their sums wrong and do not understand how universities work. They thought fees would be £6,000 or £6,500, but why would universities charge that amount when it costs them £10,000, £11,000 or £12,000 to educate someone? At the university of Cambridge, it costs £14,000 to educate an undergraduate. Why on earth would it not charge £9,000 to recoup some of that cost? The incompetence of Ministers has been absolutely breathtaking, and the suggestion of the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) that the problem was advice from civil servants was, I thought, rather grotesque.

And what fees they are! Nine thousand pounds. Every decent university will go for the top rate, so we will go from having some of the lowest fees to having some of the very highest. That represents an ideological decision to withdraw the state from higher education. Only that can explain the decision to cut 80% of the higher education teaching grant. The headline fees will put students off, and for all the guff that we heard about special provisions, when people see the figure of £9,000, it will be very hard to convince them.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend must be aware, as I and many others are, that the cuts are wholly disproportionate. We are destroying humanities, arts and language courses all over the country, and we are denying the opportunity of education to many working-class youngsters, because the cuts are in favour of vocational courses rather than pure academic ones. Does he believe that that is selling the whole country short?

[Tristram Hunt]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. The Government’s attack on humanities has been grotesque from the beginning. Their intervention to try to make the Arts and Humanities Research Council fund big society research could not have been more laughable. There will be an effect on history, French and humanities courses.