Student Loans

Jonathan Brash Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to set the interest rate on Plan 2 student loans at a level which ensures that balances will never rise faster than RPI inflation; further calls on the Government to stop the freeze on repayment thresholds; and also calls on the Government to create more apprenticeships for 18-21 year olds, funded by controlling the number of places on university courses where the benefits are significantly outweighed by the cost to graduates and taxpayers.

In June 2023, the then shadow Education Secretary, the right hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson), proclaimed, “Graduates, you will pay less under Labour”. Well, it turns out that that was not true; under Labour, graduates are paying more. So far, under this Government tuition fees have gone up twice. This is a long way from the abolition of tuition fees offered up by a fresh-faced candidate for the Labour leadership just a few years ago—I wonder what happened to him.

It is no wonder that students feel misled by this Government. Not content with hiking tuition fees when they said they would not, this Government also froze the thresholds for repayments, making loans even more expensive for graduates. As with everything this Chancellor touches, she makes it worse. Her choice to freeze the repayment thresholds has left young people paying more and sooner. What did the Chancellor say when challenged about the threshold freeze in January? She said that the student loan system is “fair and reasonable”. To be clear, this was the stance—that the student loan system and the threshold freeze were “fair and reasonable”—of the Labour Government as recently as January. Tell that to the graduate forced to pay an extra £24,000 because of the Chancellor’s changes. The Chancellor is wrong: it is not fair or reasonable.

[Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

Given that plan 2 tuition fees were introduced by the Conservatives in 2012, that they froze the repayment thresholds in 2016 and that they abolished the maintenance grants, was that fair then?

[Laura Trott]

The hon. Gentleman is missing the fact that Labour has made it worse. Even now, the Chancellor has changed her tune—no surprise given the track record of this Government. She now says that the system is “broken”, but young people are apparently not at the “front of the queue”. I did not see that on the front of the Labour manifesto. We on the Opposition Benches think that young people should be at the front of the queue, because thanks to Labour, Britain’s youth unemployment rate has topped the eurozone for the first time ever. Graduates coming out of university cannot get jobs. Graduates in work are seeing their student debt mounting up.