Higher Education (England) Regulations

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Wednesday 13th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

As I have probably pointed out before, I represent more students than any other Member, by a long way, and on their behalf I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), the shadow Secretary of State, for securing this debate. She has fought as hard to ensure that Parliament is involved in key decisions on student funding as the Secretary of State has fought to avoid it.

It is not as if the Government do not know the system is at breaking point. They clearly do. In July, after Labour’s commitment in the recent election put the abolition of tuition fees at the centre of the political agenda, the First Secretary of State, the Prime Minister’s deputy, called for a national debate on the issue, and only yesterday the Chancellor of the Exchequer apparently told the Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords that the Government were carefully considering a review because—this is the reason he gave—the system had not worked out as originally expected. A bit of an understatement!

Why are the Government ploughing ahead regardless with the fees increase? It is important that we not only reject this increase but look to make fundamental change. According to reports, the Government are considering some change. As the Chair of the Education Select Committee did, they are floating the idea of reducing the interest charged on student debt. Clearly the rate is too high—I have argued against it previously and action should be taken—but of all the changes to make it is perhaps the least important. It is probably attractive to the Government for the reason that the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) pointed out: because it will primarily assist higher earners. It will not help those most in need, however, from the poorest families who will, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, face the greatest debt burden.

What should the Government do then? They should start by reintroducing maintenance grants for students from lower-income households. They were central to the 2012 settlement. The House would not have agreed to the £9,000 fees without those grants, and the fact that the Government got rid of them at the first opportunity when they formed a Conservative Administration on their own says an awful lot about their priorities. They should reconsider and reverse that decision.

Before cutting interest rates, the Government should think about the retrospective changes to repayment terms. Obviously everybody understands that they got their calculations badly wrong on the unrepayable debt. Its measure, the resource accounting and budgeting charge, rose relentlessly from the introduction of the new system in 2012. People make mistakes, but what was wrong was for the Government to make graduates pay for the consequences—to make them pay for the Government’s miscalculation by changing the terms of the deal to which they had signed up. Before the 2015 general election, I asked Ministers for assurances that they would not make those changes, and I was told that they had no plans to do so, but no sooner were the votes counted than those plans were rolled out in the 2015 Budget. Unfreezing the repayment threshold—making graduates pay more than was in the contract they signed up to—is frankly fraudulent. It undermines confidence in the student loans system and trust in democracy, and it should be reversed.

Finally, the Government should reconsider the decision to scrap bursaries and introduce fees and loans for nursing, midwifery and allied health courses, as a number of people have mentioned. Back in January 2016, when we debated the issue in Westminster Hall, the then Health Minister, Ben Gummer, told Members—this is a good one, wait for it—that the move would lead to an increase in applications. Now we know how wrong they were. In my city, there has been a drop of 22% in applications to Sheffield Hallam University, but it did slightly better than the rest of the country, because across the UK the drop is estimated to be 26%.

On issue after issue in relation to student funding, the Government have got it wrong. Today they can start to get it right. They can agree with us in ruling out this increase and, beyond that, they can revert to their 2005 manifesto commitment and join us in committing to abolish tuition fees.