Higher Education Policy

Roberta Blackman-Woods Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

The Government are purposefully and quite unprecedentedly shifting the burden of the costs of university tuition from the public purse on to the shoulders of individual graduates, moving away from the assumption that both society and the student should bear the costs of university education. It is notable that the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who is not in his place, simply refused to engage with that point when he spoke earlier.

The Business Secretary announced to Members in Parliament that a fee cap of somewhere between £6,000 and £9,000 would be introduced, and that fees would be £9,000 only in exceptional circumstances—that £9,000 would be an exception, not the rule. The announcement was much repeated elsewhere, but we know that, of those universities that had made their plans public by last week, the average fees will be £8,678.36—so just marginally less than that £9,000 figure.

We also have to bury the myth that students will pay less under the Government’s proposals. It is true that monthly outgoings, in some circumstances and for some students, might be less, but graduates will pay back their loans for much longer and at an interest rate that has not been fully determined. This is despite the fact that the independent Office for Budget Responsibility said in November and reiterated more recently that increasing tuition fees and funding student loans in 2015-16 will require the Government to borrow £10.7 billion, compared with the £4.1 billion that they borrowed in 2010-11, a point that was excellently made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Mr Smith).

In the context of such sharply rising fees, it is worth looking at some international comparisons. What is happening elsewhere in higher education? A recent article in The Economist on American fees reported that annual tuition and fees averaged £1,639 at two-year colleges, £4,595 at public four-year colleges for in-state students and £7,246 at public four-year schools for out-of-state students—all substantially less than the fees proposed for students in this country.

The situation gets worse if we look at Canada.

[Dr Whiteford]

I remind the hon. Lady that she does not have to look so far from home to find students who do not have to pay fees, because education is an investment in their future.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

Indeed. The hon. Lady makes an excellent point; we should always refer to what is happening in the devolved Administrations as well.

In 2007-08, the fees in the Canadian system were £2,866 and in Australia they were £2,600. What has been proposed for this country is absolutely out of line with our competitor countries across the board. According to quite a conservative estimate, the debt that a student will accrue, if they have to pay the £9,000 maximum and then accommodation and living expenses, could amount to about £48,000. If they then went on to do a master’s and a PhD, the student could come out with a debt of £70,000-plus. That is extraordinary.

[Mr Lammy]

On that excellent point, is my hon. Friend as concerned as I am that the plans will lead to catastrophically low levels of UK students deciding to go on to postgraduate study? Is she concerned that our university sector is actively recruiting abroad—notwithstanding the visa requirements imposed on it—and that we will therefore educate international students but deny that to students from this country?

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

Indeed. My right hon. Friend has made a number of excellent points. It is interesting that we have heard nothing from the Government parties and nothing from the Minister about the impact of the proposals on postgraduate education in this country. The House will have to return to that issue in due course.

Graduates could be incurring extraordinarily high debts. The Government simply have no electoral mandate to do what they have done; it was not in any of the manifestos or in the coalition agreement. The costs are being pushed on to students because of the massive 80% cut being made to the university teaching grant. That does not fall uniformly across all universities; it hits hardest the universities with high numbers of students studying arts-based subjects. We simply do not know what the impact will be on the longer-term career aspirations of our students, but we need to continue to develop jobs in the creative industries. That is important for my region of the north-east, but it is also important across the board.

I am also really concerned that the Government do not seem to be paying any attention whatever to the possible deterrent effect of the proposals. There is an increasing constellation of evidence showing that an increase in tuition fees—particularly to the levels proposed —puts off people from applying to university. An Ipsos MORI survey last year of 2,700 11 to 16-year-olds showed that even marginal increases in tuition fees had a significant deterrent effect on participation among young people. Some 17% of the young people who responded said that they were unlikely to go to university if tuition fees increased to £5,000, with 46% saying that that they would not go if fees were increased to £10,000 a year. If the Government dispute those findings, they need to come up with alternative findings of their own. They have simply not commissioned research into the issue.

The Government say that they are remedying the situation with the national scholarship programme and tuition fee waivers, but we know from work that million+ has carried out on the national scholarship programme so far that it is over complex and that students simply do not know what will be available to them. The information about the programme is not available in an easily accessible format. That could lead to a postcode lottery.

We know, of course, that all these changes are part of a wider trend, with the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance and the future jobs fund, which helped to get young people into jobs. The Government are deliberately engineering a situation where the life opportunities of young people will be increasingly worse than those of their parents, and that is simply a disgrace.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—