University Tuition Fees

Matt Rodda Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

I appreciate the opportunity to speak this afternoon, Sir David. I was due to be a member of a statutory instrument Committee but was kindly relieved of that duty by a colleague. I thank all those who signed the petition that allows us to have this debate. I support the comments made by my hon. Friends the Members for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) and for Hartlepool (Mike Hill) and by other Opposition speakers.

I will address fee repayments in my constituency. Reading is a university town, as many hon. Members may know, with a particularly high number of graduates. The local workforce has a high proportion of highly skilled and highly trained people in industries such as IT, research in the public and private sectors, and a range of applied technology businesses—many of which are exactly the sort of business that the Government seek to see grow as we are due to leave the European Union. Many of those young graduates are above the loan repayment threshold but do not yet command such a high salary as to be insulated from the effect of fee repayments. I notice hon. Members nodding; the situation is similar in many other high-growth parts of the country.

I will give additional details to illustrate how the mistaken tuition fees policy has a harmful impact on that group of people and on economic growth in areas that are hubs and should be fostered, as the Government have pointed out. A practical example is a teacher in their 20s living in Reading who has effectively had a 15% pay cut—this applies to public and private sector staff, as many private sector employees have had a real-terms pay cut too—but faces an additional charge on their income of up to 9% a year through tuition fee repayments because they are in the cohort that has been through the £9,000 a year regime. We can imagine the impact on key workers such as teachers, nurses, social workers, university staff, IT workers and others. That must also be viewed in the context of high house prices and the high cost of living such as the high travel-to- work costs of a season ticket to London or for local commuting—many people in the Thames Valley commute between towns with growing high-tech industries such as Maidenhead, Reading and Newbury, where Vodafone is based. House prices can be as high as £300,000 for a two-bedroom terraced house in Reading. Not all houses are that price, but that context is significant.

At the same time, a young person in their 20s or 30s who has to repay large amounts of debt, who faces relatively static pay or indeed a pay cut, and who faces high house prices, may want to start a family but may delay that because of the impact of the extra costs and burdens on them. Many employers in high-growth areas such as Reading are suffering staff shortages. The high real cost of repayments in a high cost of living area is part of the cocktail of factors affecting those shortages. We have a shortage of teachers locally, as was pointed out to me by the local head teachers I met last week. Young staff, potentially some of the most important in the educational sector, who have gone through their initial teacher training, who are bedding in and who have a lot of their career ahead of them, are moving out of our area to live in lower cost parts of the country where the effects of loan repayment will be less. The same is true for areas such as social work, nursing and midwifery, where real concerns have been raised; the four-hour A&E wait target has not been met at our local hospital for many months.

Private sector employers are also heading in the same direction. We have some very large employers in our local IT sector, as well as a burgeoning group of entrepreneurial small businesses and a large supply chain. Many people in those supply chain businesses and many of the entrepreneurs cannot command the same salaries as the highest of high flyers in blue chip industries. I hope the Government will consider that, particularly on the day they have launched their industrial strategy, and reflect on the need to allow these clusters to develop in towns and cities such as Reading—the small and rapidly growing urban centres with universities that are the engines our economy needs as we face the challenge of Brexit.

The challenge of repaying such debts is increasing year on year, given the context I have described. Not only have tuition fees risen, but other costs have too. In particular, the cost of housing is significant and growing because the supply is not expanding. Conservative Members will point to the Government’s Budget measures last week, but I remain sceptical because other Government measures have not raised the supply of housing. Sadly, under George Osborne, plans for 1,000 new council houses in my constituency were stopped by the Government’s mistaken approach, and the Government have fought the local council’s attempts to keep a larger proportion of housing at affordable levels in private developments.

Given the rising house prices, the lack of real housing supply in the area, and the further austerity that will lead to further falls in real earnings for people in the public sector, and possibly for people in the private sector as the local labour market is depressed as a result, it is high time for the Government to reconsider their tuition fees policy. I urge Government Members to do so—particularly the Minister, who I know is a deeply cerebral and thoughtful man. I am sure that they have the best of intentions. If they take a step back, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West suggested, and look at the international comparators and the trajectory we are on, I believe they will reconsider their worrying and mistaken policy.

May I conclude with a small plug for the University of Reading and other local institutions? Our town is lucky to have them driving local growth in IT, science and other fields. I hope that such growth continues to flourish, but I fear the tuition fees policy may be an obstacle to it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Carol Monaghan]

It is quite simple; once again, look north. One of my party’s fundamental principles is that education is about the ability to learn and not about the ability to pay, as I have already said. Paying for education is a duty of Government, of business and of society, which includes the taxpayer, to ensure that we have a well-educated population that can provide economic growth in different businesses and different sectors. Post-Brexit there will be a struggle to create economic growth. It is a duty of us all to pay our taxes so that those taxes can fund the higher education of our young people.

[Matt Rodda]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. I just wanted to make a point of clarification about PISA, which is a very interesting international study. As someone who was a civil servant in the Department for Education some years ago and who has worked in the sector recently, I think it is important to look at the broad picture that PISA gives but also to understand its strengths and weaknesses. One significant thing about PISA is that the countries with education systems that do best in the test tend to be those with high levels of investment in education and of teacher qualification and a generally pro-education culture. Of these, the western countries are Finland and Canada, both of which have a lot to offer in pointing us in the right direction.

The hon. Lady comments on Scotland and on the nature of PISA. My understanding, from having worked with academics who are specialists in the comparison of different education systems and, indeed, in broader educational research, is that there are criticisms of PISA—it is one of a number of measures—but it measures not rote learning but rather students’ ability as teenagers to understand complex material and to act on their own. The Minister may want to comment on that as well. Trying to dismiss PISA as the hon. Lady does might be misleading, and she perhaps needs to look further into the issue. That it not to say that PISA is perfect—there is an extensive, learned debate among academics who specialise in education policy on its pros and cons—but I caution her about trying to dismiss it as a rote-learning exercise because, in my understanding, it is not.

--- Later in debate ---

[Joseph Johnson]

I take note of the hon. Lady’s comments. The Sutton Trust has been engaged in this area of study for many years and has had plenty of opportunity to take on board points from her party over the years, but it has evidently chosen not to do so.

The Government remain committed to widening participation in HE. England’s sustainable student finance system has enabled record numbers of disadvantaged 18-year-olds to benefit. As my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) noted, in 2016 disadvantaged 18-year-olds in England were 43% more likely to go to university than they were in 2009, and the application rate for disadvantaged 18-year-olds increased to a record high once again in the 2017 entry cycle.

[Matt Rodda]

I am grateful for the Minister’s wide-ranging discussion of the issues. Will he meet employers from my constituency, and possibly from other high-cost areas, to address the issue that my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) mentioned—namely, that graduates on middle incomes may end up paying more in tuition fee repayments over time than those on the highest salaries, and that that may have a damaging effect on local economies? I would be very grateful if we could meet the Minister and officials to discuss that matter.

[Joseph Johnson]

I am always happy to discuss these matters with colleagues. I will be keen to do so.

There is always more to do on widening participation, including on the progression of disadvantaged students to more selective institutions and ensuring that the retention, success and progress of some of those students is better. Universities have committed to spend £860 million on improving access and success for students from disadvantaged backgrounds through access agreements agreed for 2018-19 with the independent director of fair access. Through the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, the Government introduced measures to make further progress, including a statutory duty on the new regulator—the Office for Students—to have regard to equality of opportunity in connection with access to and success in higher education for students from disadvantaged and under-represented groups. We have also created a director for fair access and participation within the OFS as an executive board member.

Access and participation plans—the successor to access agreements—will ensure that any provider wanting to charge higher fees must have a plan agreed before they can do so as a condition of their registration with the Office for Students. The Act also created a transparency duty for all providers, which means that they will have to publish application, offer, acceptance, completion and attainment information, broken down by gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic background, so that all students can make an informed choice about which university they attend and so universities can see where they need to make further progress on widening access.

In his thoughtful speech, the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Gordon Marsden) rightly mentioned the numbers of part-time and mature students, as he has done on many occasions when we have discussed these matters. Studying part-time and later in life can bring enormous benefits for individuals, the economy and employers. That is why the Government are taking steps to help hard-working people who want to gain new skills and advance their careers by studying part time. The Government intend further to enhance the student finance package for part-time students by introducing part time maintenance loans in 2018-19. In the 2017 Act, we enshrined the need for the new higher education sector regulator to have regard to part-time study.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned drop-out rates. Access to higher education is only one aspect of improving social mobility. The full benefits of gaining a degree are experienced only by those who actually complete their studies. Non-continuation rates for UK students at English institutions are lower now than they were in 2009-10 for all categories—young, mature, disadvantaged and black and minority ethnic students. Although progress has been made, the Government continue to look carefully at this area and are working with universities to focus on improving retention via the access agreement process and the teaching excellence and student outcomes framework, one of whose core metrics is non-continuation and drop-out rates, as the hon. Gentleman knows.

The Government are committed to removing access to finance as a barrier to entering higher education, which is why we continue to make more money available to students than ever before. Many hon. Members mentioned living costs. Students who started their courses this academic year—2017-18—have access to the highest ever amounts of funding to support their living costs at university. Our system deliberately targets living cost support at those from the lowest income families, who need it most. Replacing maintenance grants with loans— the theme of several Members’ remarks—enabled the Government to increase support for full-time students’ living costs by 10.3% for students on the lowest incomes in 2016-17, with a further 2.8% increase in such support for the current year.

With a view to the future, we are further strengthening our approach to widening participation by placing an overarching duty on the Office for Students to consider the promotion of equality of opportunity in relation to access and participation in all that it does. The new director for fair access and participation will have a clear role within the Office for Students to look across the student lifecycle.

The current student finance system is achieving our aims of widening participation and increasing the income that goes to the sector. As I said, funding per student, per degree is up 25% since the funding reforms at the beginning of the previous Parliament. The university system is better funded than it has been at any point over the past 30 years. The progressive nature of the system is ensuring that higher education is open to all people who have the potential to benefit from it. In all of this, the Government are ensuring that the costs of our system are split fairly between graduates and other taxpayers, with graduate contributions linked to income.

The current system has allowed the sector to grow and has made higher education accessible to a greater number of 18-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds than ever before. Reducing or abolishing fees would take us back to the days of underfunded universities and limited access for disadvantaged students, and would inevitably result in often hard-pressed taxpayers paying the bill for a system that would benefit the few, not the many: bad for students, bad for universities and poor value for money.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered e-petition 182953 relating to university tuition fees.