Higher Education Funding

Debate between Rupa Huq and Georgia Gould

Wednesday 28th October 2026 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for School Standards (Georgia Gould)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) on securing this really important debate. She is a passionate advocate for these issues: she has chaired the APPG on students and has regularly raised issues related to universities and students, and from her speech we heard how thoughtful and knowledgeable she is on these issues.

I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Pam Cox) for her characteristically thoughtful speech. She called for a wider debate, discussion and focus on these issues, and we have had a very important debate today. We have heard the range of expertise in the Chamber, from lecturers to others who have real experience of working in universities, and about the range of decades when everyone went to university—I cannot believe that anyone here looks old enough to have gone to university under Margaret Thatcher.

We should rightly be proud of our world-class higher education sector, which remains, by any objective metric, one of our nation’s greatest exports and a global beacon of intellectual excellence. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) that the UK’s university sector includes four of the world’s top 10 universities, of which we can be very proud. It contributes more than £265 billion to the UK and supports more than 750,000 jobs. In my work as Schools Minister, I get to see directly the contribution that universities make to places and how integrated they are in local innovation, support and access.

I have spent quite a bit of time in Sheffield and have seen the contribution that the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University make to the local area, whether through their pioneering work on opening up participation to university or some of their wider research: Sheffield Innovation Spine, the work that Sheffield Hallam University is doing on early years and Sheffield Children’s University, and the work that the University of Sheffield is doing on adult social care.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) was talking, I was reflecting on being in Sunderland two weeks ago, where we are working on Mission North East, and the role that Sunderland University is playing in partnership to support better outcomes for children in the area.

The Government are committed to maintaining a world-class higher education sector that delivers for students, our society and the economy. We of course recognise that the sector’s financial environment is challenging. The sector is rightly independent from Government, with providers managing their finances and ensuring that their business models provide long-term sustainability. However, I recognise the long-term challenges that many Members have raised and the strain that we saw over the last decade, including the legacy of seven years of frozen tuition fees. Universities have had to deal with the issues caused by that.

[Dr Huq]

I know the Minister is really passionate about this subject, and her Department has done excellent work with the Department for Work and Pensions on the phenomenon of those not in education, employment or training. A statistic shared by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) was that the UK has the lowest proportion of public tertiary education expenditure among OECD countries. Could the Minister have a word with Treasury colleagues about nudging that upwards, because that is a statistic we are not so proud of?

[Georgia Gould]

Of course, I always support greater funding for education and young people, but I was just about to talk about some of the changes the Government are making to support sustainability.

After they were frozen for eight years, we increased tuition fee caps in line with inflation for 2025-26. We will increase them once again in line with forecast inflation in 2026-27 and in 2027-28. We will then legislate when parliamentary time allows to increase tuition fee caps automatically for future academic years. Over the coming year, that is £6 billion-worth of safeguarded indexed increase in income underpinned by the Government, which will make a real difference.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central asked about the Government’s vision for universities. We have set out an ambitious programme of reform through the post-16 education and skills White Paper, with a clear vision for a more sustainable and collaborative higher education sector. We want providers to be clear about their distinctive roles but to be working in collaboration.

My hon. Friend also mentioned the importance of research. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Dr Prinsley) talked about the pioneering research on prostate cancer at East Anglia. Research is a critical role that universities play. The Government are investing a record £86 billion in R&D from 2026-27 to 2029-30; as part of that, UK Research and Innovation will deliver an expected £38.6 billion of research investment, rising to nearly £10 billion per year by the end of that period. In the Department for Education, we are working closely with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to deliver the White Paper’s commitments, which include research funding reform and improvements to research grant cost recovery.

We heard from almost all the Members who spoke in the debate about the importance of opening up access and ensuring that young people who want to go to university can always pursue that route. That is why we do not support the Conservatives’ proposals, which would pull up the drawbridge because they are about reducing the number of young people going to university. We know that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds will be the ones who do not get that opportunity.