Disabled Students Allowance

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hood. I add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) on securing this debate.

I have a simple argument to put to the Minister: the proposals are flawed, they need to be dropped and they need to be dropped now. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) that the Minister is a good Minister and a good man. He has been put in a difficult position, and I hope that in today’s excellent debate he sees a consensus that stretches across the House. We are here with him to help him win the argument and to put the proposals where they need to be, which is in the bin.

We have heard powerful arguments this afternoon about the success of DSA, how the proposed changes are slipshod and why it was wrong to develop these proposals not in the open but in secret. We have heard powerful arguments about why DSA is so successful. We do not give disabled students enough help to change their lives by going to university, and we have to hold on to that basic fact in this debate. I congratulate the National Union of Students on its work to expose how important DSA is to thousands of students. Some 60% of disabled students are terribly worried about the cost of living, which is a much higher proportion than for most students. More than half of disabled students have thought about dropping out of their course, which is a much higher proportion than for most students. That is why DSA is so important to students across the country.

Today’s debate has been particularly powerful. My hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) told her own story, but we have also heard stories from my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and from my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Mr Smith) about people they represent who have serious worries. The National Union of Students has collected similar stories, such as the story of Lucia, who said that university “wasn’t easy.” She knows that

“without the validation and…support from DSA I wouldn’t have kept going… I certainly wouldn’t have been able to get my first class honours degree, and I would have been lucky to finish.”

There are stories such as Suzanna’s. She said:

“I get DSA for dyslexia. I expect I am one of those David Willetts would class as having ‘mild difficulties’. My study…advisor is a godsend.”

She now wants to finish neuroscience and cure Parkinson’s disease. She said:

“Without DSA I would probably still be a waitress. A bad waitress at that.”

There are stories like Charlotte’s. She said that when she was making her university choices the availability of DSA was key to her getting into university and changing her life. In the background briefing for this debate we have heard argument after argument for protecting, preserving and enhancing DSA.

The Campaign for Science and Engineering makes the interesting point that if we care about the supply line of science, technology, engineering and maths skills in our economy, we should care about the future of DSA:

“One of the most worrying developments for STEM is the removal of…‘higher specification and/or higher cost computers…because of the way in which a course is delivered’”.

CASE continues:

“DSA funding will… only be provided for ‘the most specialist non-medical help (NMH) support.’ The definition of… ‘specialist’ is not clear.”

Many hon. Members have made that point today. The proposal would damage the chances of people on STEM courses in particular, which is why the changes are such bad news. In this House we are always happy to hear the case for reform. When pressed by hon. Members at oral questions the other day, the Minister said that no student would be worse off. That is a very big promise. Let us be honest: most of us here would like to believe him, but when my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) tabled a parliamentary question to the Minister on 26 June about the extent to which DSA would be supported in future, answer came there none. The question was dodged, and that is why so many of us in this House have such serious concerns.

The Minister will no doubt want to remind us that the bill for DSA has gone up. That is true, but in the last year for which figures are available it has gone down by £5 million, while the number of disabled students who are supported has gone up, so each of them is actually getting much less. That is why we are so worried about a kind of carte blanche shunt of responsibilities to universities.

We have heard very clearly today the warnings from experienced people in this House about what happens when responsibility is shunted over. The hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) put the case powerfully. There is too much ambiguity in an Act as high level as the Equality Act, important though that is. We should be honest about what is going on. This is a cost shunt to universities—let us call it what it is—but it is a cost shunt without any safeguards to go with it, and that is why so many of us are worried. I think the Minister will acknowledge that that is one heck of a gamble with the futures of disabled students in our country. It is certainly not a gamble that we want to see.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) made an important point when she underlined how the risk of a postcode lottery in the way disabled students are supported will mean that people’s choices will be damaged. They will not be able to pursue the choices that they want. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) pointed out, it will be the most inclusive universities that are most damaged by the proposal. The worst-case scenario, we are told, is grim indeed.

I was concerned, as I know the Minister was, when I read the briefing from people who are expert in supporting disabled students, which stated that the worst-case scenario could see 60% to 70% of DSA eliminated. That is an enormous bill. The Minister accepts there is a problem with supporting disabled students at university, which is why he is not proposing the abolition of DSA. The fact that DSA is to continue is an acceptance of the principle that extra central Government support is needed.

We are not being told what the real objectives of the reform will look like. By how much does the Minister seek to cut the bill? How big will the cost shunt be? They are not the sort of questions we should be debating here this afternoon. We should have been debating them long ago—in January, February or March—before the ministerial statement appeared. Opposition Members are worried, as I am sure the hon. Member for Cambridge is too, that organisations such as the National Deaf Children’s Society felt they were not given a real chance to put their points of view in meetings that were simply cut short. That is not a standard of consultation that we are prepared to see, because the issue is simply too important.

If there is a need for modernisation, let us hear it. The Minister is a good man and a good Minister. He should be up front with us about how much he is seeking to save. He should be debating with us what extra safeguards need to be put in place to protect the rights and opportunities for disabled students in the years to come. The need is urgent. Lord Addington has told the other place that guidance for April is being drawn up. All of us wanted to be part of any changes that needed to be introduced. That is what we got when the DWP proposed to change the DLA and introduce the personal independence payment. It is the approach that we saw when the DWP wanted to introduce universal credit. Those were big and important changes, and Opposition Front Benchers were invited to the Department to discuss them. We may have disagreed with the conclusions, but at least we had the chance to flag up a few warnings, make a few suggestions and ensure that the debate was had in public, not in secret.

I think the Minister is a good man who will want to think again about the proposals. The debate should not have been today; it should have been in the early part of the year before the proposals were drawn up. If modernisation is needed, let us hear the arguments. If there are savings to be had, let us hear the targets, but we will not stand by while disabled students are given a bunch of proposals and told to like it or lump it. Disabled students demand and deserve much better than that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Willetts]

I am not sure that this extra time will be as good as that in the Belgium versus United States match, but I will do my best. I welcome hon. Members who have come for the next debate and apologise to them.

I was starting to wind up the debate, explaining why it is legitimate to carry out the review and why the term “modernisation” is legitimate. One argument in that regard was about technical change. I was also saying that there is a genuine issue about obligations under the Equality Act, whereby universities have a duty to make reasonable adjustments for students who are disabled. We have to get the balance right between the institutional obligation on the university and personal financial support for the individual student. I was giving an example of how a library should function, saying that the obligation could be discharged by a library properly training its staff to help people with a range of disabilities. That may be a more effective way of delivering support for disabled people than individual disabled students turning up at the library with a personal assistant to help them. It is legitimate to try to get the individual versus institution balance reviewed in the light of the equalities duties.

The right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough did not like the fact that I referred to the funding available for universities, but several hon. Members, beginning with my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge but not only him, specifically asked, “How will universities pay, given that you are expecting them to discharge these institutional obligations?” There are two genuine points to be made in response, although more could be made.

First, with regard to the equalities duties that the House has introduced under successive Governments, by and large we do not say, “We therefore need an extra stream of funding for the NHS”, any more than we say that there should be extra public support for Marks & Spencer. Hon. Members should remember that, legally, universities are independent institutions outside the public sector. The general view across the House, when we have imposed equality duties, has been that that is just part of the proper functioning of an institution.

Secondly, it is fortunate that our universities are in a healthy financial position. I will not stray from the point, as happened in the argument a few minutes ago between the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) and my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge, but the sums going to universities for teaching—the combination of the grant income and the fee income that they receive—is rising substantially as a result of the controversial changes that we introduced, going from £7.9 billion total income in 2011-12 to £9.9 billion in 2015-16.

To be frank with hon. Members who voted against the £9,000 fee—I suspect that the majority of those in this Chamber did so—it is inconceivable that universities would have enjoyed a £2 billion increase in teaching income in the life of this Parliament under any other model of financing universities, especially one that depended on public expenditure through grant. There is a genuine increase in their financial resource. Several hon. Members expressed concern that our proposal comes at a bad time, when universities have not got any money, but in fact they have had an increase in their cash resource.

[Mr Byrne]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way with characteristic generosity. Can he help hon. Members? He has made an eloquent argument for the need to rebalance responsibilities between central Government and independent universities, saying that we need to do so because it is a long time since we have considered the matter. By how much is he seeking to reduce the DSA budget over the next financial year and the one after? He must know, because he has a list of specific measures.

[Mr Willetts]

I was going to get to that point in a moment. We are still consulting—it is a genuine consultation—so I cannot give the House a specific figure, because that will depend on a host of things, including exactly how the proposals are implemented and wider effects. However, it is a budget that has grown rapidly. Incidentally, the right hon. Gentleman said that that growth had stopped. There is always a difference between the provisional figures and the final outcome figures. My personal expectation is that the final outcome figures for the latest year should be higher than those for the previous year. It is not fair to compare final outcome figures with provisional figures. We will see. The budget has increased from about £88 million when we came to office to about £125 million now, so it is legitimate to look at it. However, we do not have a specific allocated figure.