Student Maintenance Grants

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. That is why such efforts have been made to address the A-level and exam system. As someone who was outward-facing in my career at the University of Leeds, I was shocked to go to countries in Europe such as Germany and be told of worries about the standard of UK degrees because of the A-levels that were done to get on those courses. As a prime example, we had to lay on two extra modules of basic maths in year 1 of our engineering degree because we had students who could not cope with the mathematics used in engineering, although they had good grades at A-level.

That is part of a bigger picture, and the point of today’s debate—opportunity for everybody to go to university. It is all very well to say that grants should not be cut without proposing an alternative way of raising the money, but the system would become unaffordable as a consequence, limiting the numbers of people going to university. I went to a comprehensive school. My parents were teachers. I became a professional engineer and then a Conservative MP. My sister qualified two months ago as a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. No money was spent sending us to private school. We went out and got our own part-time jobs to fund our way to university. I took on a private job at WH Smith when I was still at school.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is telling the House in clear terms an explicit Conservative story of hard work, opportunity and meritocracy, in sharp contradistinction to the narrative from the Opposition, who were too busy thinking about their reshuffle to pray against the order and are far too busy plotting and planning to keep people in their places, rather than busting the glass ceilings.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. This is what today’s Opposition debate is about. It is not about how we best move this country forward. That is why, under 13 years of Labour government, social mobility decreased. The statistics and the facts cannot be argued with. The fact that there has been a 36% increase in those from the poorest backgrounds going to university, the fact that we raised the income at which a student loan had to be paid back to £21,000, the fact that we reduced the amount to be paid back each day, the fact that people do not start paying interest on it until they leave university, the fact that it is time limited so that it is written off after a specified time—all these are key aspects of making sure that we get people to university and reap the best of their potential.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I begin by thanking my hon. Friends the Members for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) and for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden) for the fact that this debate is taking place. The Government would have been more than happy for these sweeping changes to higher education to pass through Parliament unnoticed, hidden away in delegated legislation—worst of all, a negative SI—with no public scrutiny. I am therefore pleased that at least we are able to call the Minister to account. However, it is extremely disappointing that he showed no contrition whatever for introducing policies that are likely to limit the aspirations of many young people in this country, or at the very least make it more difficult for them to achieve them.

[Simon Hoare]

rose—

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman because we are very short of time.

We know that these changes will affect many students. The House of Commons Library states that in 2014-15, 395,000 students received a full grant, with 135,000 getting a partial grant. That amounts to over half a million students. Currently, students who go into higher education from families with an annual income of £25,000 or less are eligible for the full grant of £3,387, and students from households with an annual income of between £25,000 and £42,620 are eligible for a partial grant. However, in the summer Budget of July, plans were announced to remove the student maintenance grant, arguing that the grants had become “unaffordable”. This, in itself, is an assertion that needs to be deconstructed. Politics is about priorities, and this Government have chosen not to prioritise the needs of students from low-income families and, astoundingly, to make them a target for cuts.

The Government have talked endlessly about the importance of hard work and rewarding those who want to achieve, yet now they are undoubtedly making it more difficult for a number of our young people to have the opportunity to access higher education. The move to £9,000 fees in 2012 has meant that students and graduates now contribute 75% towards the overall costs of their higher education. The replacement of grants with loans will further increase the contribution of individuals compared with that of Government. Yet no conversation has taken place with students, their parents or across the country as to what the balance should be.

These changes will lead to a substantial increase in debt for poor students. Assuming that students take out the maximum loans to which they are entitled, the IFS estimates that average debt from a three-year course will rise from about £40,500 under the old system to £53,000 under the new system. This is not just a fear of debt—it is an actual increase in debt. We also know from the impact statement that these changes will particularly affect women, older students and students from ethnic minorities—reason enough to stop these policies in their tracks.

I stand here as someone who is passionate about supporting students from all backgrounds who can to get to university in accessing higher education. These changes are likely to make that more difficult for them. As a country, we need to ensure that our young people have the skills to enable them to compete in a global labour market, and I am concerned that these changes will prevent them from doing so.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)]

I recently visited Ormiston Forge Academy, which is an improving school in my constituency, and took part in an aspiration day. What struck me when I talked to the year 8 pupils was that the barriers to their thinking about going on to higher education were only partly to do with money. Primarily, they were to do with their background, whether their parents had been to university and whether their friends aspired to go to university. That was an important part of the conversation that I had with them.

The arguments that we hear from the Opposition about loans are like a recycled debate from a few years ago. Young people and students are becoming much more attuned to and understand the progressive nature of the loans system that we have introduced. Low-income graduates will not have to pay back the loans until they get over a certain income threshold.

As the Minister rightly pointed out, putting our higher education system on a sustainable footing was a choice that the Government made. They chose to design a progressive loans system to enable students of whatever background to aspire to go to university. As hon. Members have pointed out, the system that has been designed by the Government introduces maintenance loans for part-time students for the first time, which will have a considerable positive impact on social mobility. It also introduces maintenance loans for MAs and other post-graduate courses, which will provide different ways of accessing higher education.

Hearing the arguments from the Opposition feels a bit like groundhog day. As my hon. Friends have pointed out, no alternatives have been posited.

[Simon Hoare]

I think that the answer to this will be yes, but I wonder whether my hon. Friend shares my irritation with this debate because all of us in this House should be committed to improving social inclusion. He is stating very clearly the narrative that we deploy to explain these policies. The narrative from the Opposition, in my judgment, is tailored specifically to preclude people from applying to go on to further education. Is it not time that we all explained to students precisely what my hon. Friend is saying?

[James Morris]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. When I spoke to the students, it struck me that we needed to educate them about the realities of going into higher education, whether by providing better information about courses that they might be able to take or explaining what it means to take out a student loan. As he says, there is a lot of propaganda about being saddled with debt. There needs to be more education about what it means in practice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

We have had a lively and extremely interesting debate, with contributions from 17 Back-Bench speakers, by my calculation. I will not mention them, because time is short as a result of the interest in the debate.

I have some sympathy for the Minister for Universities and Science, the hon. Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), because we all know that the decision to scrap maintenance grants for the less well-off students in favour of loans was really made by the Chancellor and not by him. I know that he and the Chancellor are old friends—this goes back to the days when they were penniless students together, having to scrape by on their student grants and meagre Bullingdon club dinners—but I find it hard to believe that he went to his old friend the Chancellor and said, “Having been appointed as Universities Minister, I have suddenly decided that we were wrong to have maintenance grants for the less well-off students and it would be a great idea for the worse-off students to have the most debt after they have been to university.”

I might be wrong about the Minister, but he does not strike me—he has not until today—as the kind of person who would think it right to change the system so that, as the British Medical Association points out in its briefing for this debate, medical students from the poorest backgrounds could graduate with £100,000 of debt. Nor does he strike me as the kind of person who thinks that it is all right to go back on promises made by Tory Ministers when the new system was introduced. It was David Willetts after all who said that the tuition fees increase was progressive precisely because of the higher education maintenance grant. That was the argument made. The Minister does not strike me as the kind of politician who would cynically pursue policies that penalise younger people who are less likely to vote Tory, or even to vote at all, than others.

Despite what was said today about page 35 of the Tory party manifesto, I do not think that the Minister for Universities and Science would think it was really okay to carry out this kind of major change of policy direction without explicitly putting it into the party’s manifesto, so that the public, including young people, could see what they were voting for or against. Is he really the kind of politician who, having done all this, would then slink away from debating such a major change openly and properly on the Floor of the House in Government time? I may be wrong, but I never thought that he was that kind of politician, or that he was that cynical.

[Simon Hoare]

rose—

[Kevin Brennan]

However, I think we know someone who is that cynical. I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Simon Hoare]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was referring to me. Will he flick back through his archives and find where, in the 1997 manifesto, the Labour party had the introduction of student loans in the first place, because I cannot remember seeing it?

[Kevin Brennan]

The hon. Gentleman told us in his speech how hard he has worked. Given that he is from Cardiff and that he has such an accent, I can absolutely acknowledge that he is a very hard-working individual. He will know that a general election was fought following that decision being taken and before they were introduced.

We all know that the Chancellor prefers governing from the shadows, and this shameless betrayal of previous promises and the shabby manner in which this has been handled in Parliament bear all the hallmarks of the current Chancellor of the Exchequer. Being young in Britain should be a time of opportunity—a time when opportunity knocks. Instead, we have the Chancellor introducing an opportunity tax. His proposals are an assault on aspiration, on opportunity and on those who want to get on in life. That is why we oppose them and also why the Welsh Government, under Labour First Minister, Carwyn Jones, is keeping maintenance grants. By the way, those who say that these proposals affect only England should think again—I say this to Welsh Conservative MPs as well: of the 30,000 students studying at Cardiff University, nearly 9,000 are from England.