Tuition Fees

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Wednesday 19th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I am going to make some progress.

The Minister said that the regulations came into force on 6 January, but they did so without debate, let alone a vote in this House. Then, when we were finally granted a debate and a vote, the Prime Minister called her early election and the regulations came into force while Parliament was dissolved. We have since raised the issue repeatedly, only to be told, eventually, by the new Leader of the House that the Government do not intend to provide any time for it. So much for the Minister’s “extensive debate”.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

I promise the hon. Lady that I will listen intently to her reply. She and I will agree, I am sure, on one thing: this country is very lucky to have people with high-quality brain power at university today. They have told me and my Conservative colleagues what they thought her party leader said during the election campaign, and it is at huge variance with what the hon. Lady claims he said. Nobody remembers the weasel words and caveats that she has deployed today. Will she now apologise?

[Angela Rayner]

The hon. Gentleman calls them weasel words, but I can guarantee him that before and throughout the general election campaign I travelled up and down the country with my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition and we were absolutely clear on this. Many students—

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation (Joseph Johnson)]

The Labour party wants to talk about process because its policy platform is disintegrating before our eyes. I welcome the opportunity to set out once again the Government’s approach to the student fees regulations. This is hardly new terrain for Parliament. The Government made it clear as far back as the Budget in June 2015 that maximum tuition fees would rise in line with inflation, and I set out changes to fees in detail for 2017-18 in a written ministerial statement in July 2016. Changes to fees were subsequently extensively debated during the passage through both Houses of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, with numerous votes on student finance issues that were all won by the Government.

The regulations are not “proposed” as the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) suggested: they have been in force for six months. This debate, which cannot change arrangements for 2017-18, is therefore a sham exercise. I suspect that this is simply more of the same cynical politics we saw over the weekend, when Labour broke its own pre-election pledge—about which we have heard so much this afternoon—to write off historic student loan debts.

Let us recall precisely what the Leader of the Opposition told the NME seven days before the general election. He said:

“I don’t see why those that had the historical misfortune to be at university during the £9,000 period should be burdened excessively compared to those that went before or those that come after. I will deal with it.”

That was a clear pledge to young voters. The first sign of trouble came when the shadow Education Secretary said a few days ago that she was still trying to work out the costs of that policy on a big abacus. The penny dropped completely over the weekend when we heard from the shadow Chancellor and others that that pre-election promise was being downgraded to the lowly status of an ambition. We all know what that means. It means that it is never ever going to happen. It does not do anything for the credibility of the Labour party to abandon such a striking commitment to young people just a few weeks after the general election.

[Simon Hoare]

I may be becoming a little forgetful, but was the manifesto to which my hon. Friend just referred the “fully costed” manifesto from the Labour party?

[Joseph Johnson]

My hon. Friend has exposed the truth, which is that the Labour party is delivering what is perhaps the biggest act of political deception we have seen in decades. It is the old game of bait and switch, saying one thing before a general election and another thing immediately after. Of course, given that this would be a £100 billion hit to our public finances, which would hurt hard-working taxpayers across the country and deliver a significant addition to our national debt and the interest burdens of the next generation, I am glad that the Labour party has done this spectacular and embarrassing U-turn. I suspect that it will not be too long before it abandons the rest of its unaffordable, unfunded and fantastical policy platform. It is a programme that it has clearly taken wholesale from the statist playbooks of 1970s tax-and-spend regimes that all ended up needing the International Monetary Fund to step in.

The policy that Labour proposed before the general election would have increased our national debt by a whole five percentage points of GDP, adding no less than £3,500 to the debt carried by every household in the country.