Higher Education Funding

Lewis Atkinson Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Lewis Atkinson (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) on securing this debate and I congratulate Members from across the Chamber on their contributions.

It should not be said that issues facing our universities are the preserve of MPs from big cities or the leafy suburbs. As Sunderland Central’s MP, I want to highlight the importance of the University of Sunderland to my city. This is as much a red wall issue as it is anywhere else in the country.

I want to mention the university’s educational and economic impact, and what the higher education funding environment means for our city. The university comes from the proudest of polytechnic traditions. It is rooted in the city, with a mission to be open to anyone who can benefit from higher education. It is shaped by what local employers and professions need. Nowhere is that clearer than in health. Sunderland trains the nurses, pharmacists, paramedics and doctors whom our NHS rely on. Its medical school was explicitly set up to bring more working class and local students into medicine. It is now moving into dental education, in a region where too many people struggle to see NHS dentists. When it was named university of the year for social inclusion, more than six in 10 of its students were the first in their family to go to university. If I may, I will associate myself with the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey) on the intergenerational and social mobility missions of our universities. That is crucial in Sunderland, as it is elsewhere.

This is what widening participation looks like in practice: young people from Pallion, Hendon or Southwick in my constituency having the chance to get a degree and, by living at home, de-risking some of the financial issues facing students that we have talked about. The university, as we have heard, also brings people to the north-east from across the country and, as successive Governments’ international strategies have encouraged, from around the world.

On its economic impact, independent analysis found that the University of Sunderland adds around £250 million a year to our city’s economy and supports more than 4,000 jobs in the city. It is one of our biggest employers. The university, however, is under real financial pressure, which has serious consequences for the city as a whole. Home tuition income has fallen behind costs, and the visa landscape for international students has changed rapidly and unpredictably. As a result, the university has had to set out plans to save £40 million over the next two years, and staff are understandably worried about their jobs.

That pressure did not come from nowhere. For years, the previous Government froze tuition fees while costs kept rising, with no long-term plan. As others have said, the Government now expect to fund just 16p in every pound of home student funding. Universities that do the most to open doors, like Sunderland, are left the most exposed. I know the Government are working with significant fiscal constraints. I know they have taken steps to set stable expectations for future fee income so that proper financial planning can happen. I, of course, welcome the return of targeted maintenance grants. But in previous responses the Government have been keen to highlight that universities have always been autonomous institutions. I understand that. In my experience, they take the responsibility to be financially sustainable seriously, even when that means making deeply painful and locally unpopular decisions such as the withdrawal of funding from our National Glass Centre in Sunderland. But we cannot treat them as autonomous institutions and assume that they will always be there as anchors in communities like Sunderland and across the country. I hope we will hear more about the Government’s long-term strategy.