Higher Education Fees

Debate between John Denham and Tristram Hunt

Thursday 9th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Denham]

The 2001 Labour manifesto—I was a Back Bencher at the time, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) was the responsible Minister—ensured that the policy did not come into force until there had been a further general election. That is not the coalition’s proposal.

I am sorry that the Prime Minister has left, because he did his bit yesterday to run down our English universities, saying that they were unsustainable, uncompetitive and unfair. He did not say that they were world class or praise what they had achieved; he could only knock them. “Uncompetitive”? They are the second most popular destination for overseas students in the world, but the Prime Minister tells the world that they are uncompetitive. That is a great deal of help for our universities.

The Prime Minister, however, has some interesting thoughts about overseas students. When he was in China, he told Chinese students that

“we won’t go on increasing so fast the fees on overseas students, because in the past we have been pushing up the fees on overseas students and using that as a way of keeping them down on our domestic students. So we have done the difficult thing in our government which is to put up contributions from British students.”

For foreign students, he said,

“we should be able to keep that growth under control.”

Now we know why the Prime Minister wants to push up contributions—to keep down the price for Chinese students. Extraordinary!

Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that the current model of higher education funding is not providing enough money. Quoting the Browne review, he said that public funding per student is lower in real terms than 20 years ago. We are bound to ask, “How the hell did that happen?” It did not happen under Labour. I can tell the Prime Minister how it happened. Between 1989 and 1997, under the previous Conservative Government, public funding per student fell by 36% in real terms. Who was the special adviser to the Conservative Chancellor at that time? It was the Prime Minister. If he wants to know whose fault it was, he ought to look more carefully in the mirror in the morning.

Now, the Prime Minister is at it again. He was cutting university funding then; he is cutting university funding now. This is a Tory policy of cutting higher education; unfortunately, this time they have Liberal Democrats to take it through with them.

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

Why does my right hon. Friend think that the Government are so intent on destroying the humanities base in this country? Humanities is one of the leading areas of research and excellence, and they are withdrawing public funding. What do they have against it?

[Mr Denham]

It is hardly for me to try to get inside the heads of Government Members. If we read what they say, however, we see that they think, purely and simply, that subjects have no value unless they have a value in the marketplace.