Higher Education Policy

Debate between Paul Farrelly and Baroness Burt of Solihull

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)]

I have been listening carefully to the debate so far, and the remarks made by Opposition colleagues make me feel as though I have been transported into some sort of alternative reality. This is a reality where the Labour Government did not introduce up-front tuition fees in the first place, one year after Tony Blair had promised not to in 1997; where they did not introduce top-up fees two years after they had promised not to in the 2001 Labour manifesto; where they did not go into the last election having commissioned the Browne review; and where Lord Mandelson did not say, this very March, that had Labour still been in government it would have needed to double tuition fees, at least. So we will not be taking any lessons from Labour Members this afternoon.

Now I have got that off my chest, it is fair to say that the motion poses some important questions, and it is fair that they should be properly addressed. Let me start with the £9,000-a-year exceptional student tuition fees. At the moment, universities are publishing their maximum fee, not their average fee. Institutions with a “sticker” price of £9,000 will have a significantly lower average fee because of fee waivers. At Oxford, for example, some first-year students will pay only £3,500—about the same as now. At Cambridge, all students from households earning under £25,000 will pay £6,000. At Warwick, students whose family income falls below £25,000 will receive a package of up to £4,500, and their two-plus-two degrees and part-time degrees will have a fee of £6,000, which may be further reduced by an additional fee waiver.

[Paul Farrelly]

I do not want to make party political points about broken promises, and I shall not, even when those promises were being written while people were planning to break them, because that amounts to hypocrisy and the Deputy Speaker would rule me out of order. However, I have one question. If the Government’s policy is to allow universities to charge the top amount of fees only in exceptional circumstances, is it not incumbent on the Government, the Business Secretary, the leader of the Liberal Democrats and the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats to define, in percentage terms, what counts as exceptional and therefore what percentage of applications charged the £9,000 fee will be refused?

[Lorely Burt]

I was trying to be helpful to the hon. Gentleman by explaining some of the examples of how average fees will be lower than that figure.

The motion tries to commit the Government to guaranteeing that there will be no fall in the number of university places. This is another bit of collective amnesia. Labour Members cut places; they promised additional places and then cut the numbers. In 2009, the shadow Secretary of State, who was then Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, put a 10,000 cap on the expansion of places, leaving 140,000 A-level students chasing just 10,000 unfilled places at the UK’s universities. That is 14 anxious students for every unfilled place available through clearing and 130,000 willing and able students without a place. They encouraged thousands of hopeful students to apply for university and then slammed the door in their face when they got there. In 2010, they did it again, leaving 150,000 people without a university place, some of whom had six A-levels at grade A. In 2009, they cut the budget of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills by £1.9 billion, and in 2010, they cut the universities budget by £500 million.

If I may, I will read a quotation from a debate in the other place:

“The Government have made it clear that higher education needs to shoulder its fair share of the burden of reductions in public spending”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 21 January 2010; Vol. 716, c. 1101.]

Those were the words of Lord Mandelson in January 2010, when he was Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. In the same debate, he said that student numbers should be dictated by what is affordable with the resources available. The numbers should not be dictated by a central Government diktat, which says that 50% of young people should go to university. Labour set that target, but quickly realised that it did not know how to pay for it. It was left with a financial black hole and was forced to slash student places to fill it, leaving thousands of students in the lurch. Surely the right number is the number at which every student who has the desire and capability to benefit from university can go. Despite the previous Government’s undoubtedly strenuous efforts, the number of students from poorer backgrounds did not increase proportionately. That is Labour’s legacy on universities.

It is no secret that had the Liberal Democrats won the general election, we would have done things differently. However, I am proud of the coalition agreement, which incorporated two thirds of our manifesto pledges. Sadly, our tuition fees policy fell into the group of manifesto pledges that remain unfulfilled. Working in coalition has its challenges, believe me, but it also has its rewards. One of the rewards was negotiating with Conservative colleagues to make the system that we have ended up with more progressive than the Labour system we inherited. That is not only my view, but that of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. There are no up-front fees for students, graduates will start to pay only when they can afford to, and there will be lower lifetime contributions for the poorest quarter of students compared with the system that Labour left behind. There will also be more support for the Cinderellas of the HE and FE systems, part-time students, who had previously been shunned by a system geared towards full-time students.

In conclusion, it is hard to predict what will happen, given that universities are yet to announce many of the measures such as bursaries and waivers. I have concerns about the number of places and their uptake. As the Minister said earlier, that will be reviewed in autumn 2011 and I greatly hope that the steps we have taken will be vindicated.