Student Maintenance Grants

John Bercow Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Marsden]

I am sorry but a great number of people wish to speak. I have taken a number of interventions already and I really must make progress.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Just so that the House is aware, on present trends there will be only about an hour in total for Back-Bench speeches and 18 people are wanting to speak. I am underlining the potency of the point that the hon. Gentleman has just made from the Front Bench.

[Mr Marsden]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. There is a nudge factor here; it is a nudge away from progress, from that regional growth and from those opportunities for groups and individuals who traditionally have been debt averse. Asking people on higher education courses at further education colleges to take on up to £50,000-worth of debt in areas such as the north-east, where in some parts that sum could equate to the price of a small house or flat, concerns colleges such as New College Durham. Its principal, John Widdowson, has said that

“nudge can work both ways—especially for people who’ve signed up for foundation courses and are considering going for honours—the more complex you make the funding process the more it can seem a barrier.”

Those sorts of concerns were recently echoed by the Office for Fair Access. But it is the individual life chances that may be blighted or disrupted by these changes that should weigh heavily on all of us, which is why the NUS and its student bodies have been so passionate in campaigning against this change. For me, all those individual cases in FE are summed up by the email I received only yesterday from a student in Blackpool, who said that she would like to thank me

“for defending the students who will be affected by the loss of grants. I am from Blackpool and in my second year of my degree with UCLan, and a married mature student with two children.”

She said that she had been plagued by illness as a child, which is why she was having to study in her late 30s, and stated:

“The complete U-turn by the Government who said education should not just be for the privileged and should not exclude the poor has now done exactly that.”

The changes will also affect significant numbers of students in the traditional university sector, including 14,000 at Manchester Metropolitan University, 8,000-plus at the University of Manchester, nearly 11,000 at Nottingham Trent and 3,738 at King’s College London. As I have said, it is a potential list of lost opportunities.

We can only speculate on what impact the regulations will have on future cohorts of students. The National Education Opportunities Network and the University and College Union are currently undertaking research with more than 2,000 final year A-level and level 3 students to look at how costs influence the higher education choices that those students make. The interim findings from that research show that more than half the students who are deciding not to go into HE are taking that decision because of the lack of direct financial maintenance grant support that they had envisaged for the year ahead.

The equality assessment states:

“At an aggregate level there is no evidence that the 2012 reforms, which saw a significant increase in HE fees and associated student debt levels, has had a significant impact in deterring the participation of young students from low income backgrounds.”

That is now debateable, because the safety net of maintenance grants, which was introduced in 2012 with that tripling of fees, is now being removed. That is why, in her letter praying against the regulations, the shadow Secretary of State wrote:

“Labour is concerned this change won’t improve Government finances in the long term.”

That echoes the view of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which said:

“The replacement of maintenance grants by loans from 2016–17 will raise debt for the poorest students, but do little to improve government finances in the long run.”

The IFS states that, in the short term, Government borrowing will drop by around £2 billion a year, because current spending on grants counts towards current borrowing, while current spending on loans does not. In the long run, savings could well be less than that. The amount of money lent to students will rise by about £2.3 billion for each cohort, but the IFS says that only around a quarter of those additional loans are likely to be repaid. In the long run, therefore, the net effect is a reduction in Government borrowing by around £270 million per cohort, and a 3% decline in the Government’s estimated contribution to higher education. In a fair and balanced way, the IFS said:

“Students from households with pre-tax incomes of up to £25,000 (those currently eligible for a full maintenance grant) will have a little more ‘cash in pocket’…But they will also graduate with around £12,500 more debt, on average, from a three-year course. This means that students from the poorest backgrounds are now likely to leave university owing substantially more to the government than their better-off peers.”

It also states:

“The poorest 40% of students going to university in England will now graduate with debts of up to £53,000 from a three-year course, rather than up to £40,500. This will result from the replacement of maintenance grants”.

As I have already said, when the Government tripled tuition fees in 2012, they tried to sweeten the pill, by talking up the centrality of the maintenance grant to ensure that the most disadvantaged could still access higher education. They promised three things: a national scholarship programme; the maintenance grants for the disadvantaged programme; and the earnings-related threshold that would be uprated with inflation. The then Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts, said:

“The increase in maintenance grant for students from households with the lowest incomes, the National Scholarship Programme, and additional fair access requirements…should ensure that the reforms do not affect individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds disproportionately.”

That is what the Minister’s predecessor in the Conservative-led Government said in 2011-12, but the regulations that the Government passed in Committee last week will disadvantage the same groups of students that the Government promised to protect two years ago. David Willetts previously lauded the measures as a quid pro quo for the trebling of tuition fees, saying:

“Our proposals are progressive, because they help to encourage people from poorer backgrounds to go to university, because of the higher education maintenance grant, and because of the higher repayment threshold.”——[Official Report, 3 November 2010; Vol. 517, c. 940.]

Now all three elements of those promises have been broken by this Government. The Minister’s colleague, now Lord Willetts, must be revolving in his ermine at the way in which his promises have been so lightly regarded by the Government.

The Government and their predecessors set great store by the principle of “nudge”—actions that persuade people to change their behaviour for the better. Let me remind the Minister that it is possible to nudge people away from desirable outcomes rather than towards them. A new Department for Business Innovation and Skills study shows that more than half the applicants said that they had been put off university by the costs. That is backed up by the Sutton Trust, which said:

“Shifting grants to loans may move them off the balance sheet, but it could also put off many low and middle income students and tip the balance against their going to university. Since grants were reintroduced, there have been significant improvements”—

and we welcome that, but those will be—

put at risk by today’s Budget plans.”

Research from the National Union of Students, which was published last week by Populus, shows that parents are concerned that the Government’s plans to scrap the maintenance grant will discourage their children from applying to university. Two fifths of those with a combined income of £25,000 or less believe that to be the case. The range of the groups affected by the changes is daunting. The assessment concedes that black and minority ethnic students in particular will be disproportionately worse off. On older learners, it says:

“Mature students will be disproportionately impacted by the policy proposals to remove the full maintenance grant and replace with additional loan as well as the freezing of targeted grants.”

The Government have also conceded that disabled people will be disproportionately affected by the decision not to protect the real-terms value of disabled students allowances. The assessment spells out the potential for discrimination because of religious beliefs, stating that there is evidence to suggest that there are groups of Muslim students whose religion prohibits them from taking out an interest-bearing loan. Finally, the impact assessment also states that female students will be particularly affected by the freezing of childcare grants, parents’ learning allowances and employment and support allowances, given their significant over-representation in these populations.

Further to that, the scrapping of 24+ loans in further education is particularly relevant to the case before us today, because it is indicative of what has happened in previous circumstances when the Government have gone down this road. As the Minister knows, the Government released figures in October 2015 that showed clear evidence of the deterrent impact on learners that I and others warned about when these loans were introduced as replacements for grants in January 2013. The figures showed that in 2014-15 only £149 million of the £397 million allocated for the process had been taken up. It is no wonder that people in the FE community have lamented the lost opportunity of £250 million that could have helped some of our most disadvantaged learners. The very group of people who benefited from the concessions given in 2013 by the Minister’s predecessor, the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes)—that those who went on access to HE courses would have the outstanding amount written off in their access course loan—face another knock back. The damning details from the Government’s own impact assessment should surely give Ministers pause for thought, given that they threaten to affect the most debt-averse groups.

Worryingly, it appears that the Government have yet to produce an up-to-date estimate of the impact that the shift from grants to loans will have on the resource accounting and budgeting charge, which calculates the cost to the Government of the higher education funding system, based on how much students are ultimately expected to repay. Having heard the evidence that we have presented so far and the comments from around the Chamber, will the Government tell us why, if they were so confident about these policies, they did not bring them to the Floor of the House? More to the point, why did they not consult independent experts and various representative organisations? Why did they not commission research from any of the reputable independent policy bodies?

Last month, along with a number of other MPs, I sat in the corridor of this place listening to hundreds of students who had come to lobby us. Their message was consistent: scrapping maintenance grants will leave people struggling to go to university. People in the Chamber today have talked about consequences and people will talk about their own experiences. I was a tutor for the Open University for 20 years and I know that many of the students whom I taught had been put off higher education at an earlier age by the costs. Such things do not alter just because we are now in the digital world of the 21st century, and the impact of the changes, particularly on mature students, cannot be divorced from the precarious position of so many of those who study part time in HE.

Statistics published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency have shown that the number of first-year part-time students in 2014-15 is down 6% on previous years. The number of part-time higher education students since the Conservatives came into office has fallen by nearly 40%. No wonder the NUS is exasperated about that, and it relates it to the trebling of student fees since 2012 for England and English students in HE in Wales and Scotland. No wonder also that the president of Universities UK and the vice-chancellor of the University of Kent, Dame Julia Goodfellow, said that the decline in part-time numbers was a serious concern. I acknowledge, as they do, that the introduction of maintenance loans to some part-time students from 2018-19 announced by the Government is welcome, but in the meantime the nudge factors are very strong against such study. No wonder the Open University has also expressed its alarm, commenting on the Minister’s higher education Green Paper that flexible learning provision is also at the heart of Government policy development. Are not those concerns precisely why we need a proper discussion and are they not reasons why we need a commitment to bring a Bill to this House? I invite the Minister to give that in his response.

There is a lack of balance, as well as a nudging towards negative outcomes, and the issue will not go away. It is not surprising that connections have been made between the specific ways the Government have tried to dodge scrutiny in this matter. No wonder the Minister appeared relatively ill at ease in Committee, but to tell the truth perhaps the blame lies elsewhere. The article in The Independent reminds us that it was the Chancellor who tried to use a statutory instrument to smuggle through his tax credit changes, and we all know what happened to them. The Chancellor is proud of promoting himself as the Government’s master builder—all his rhetoric is shot through with the image. He preens as he boasts of the march of the makers and of how the Government, on his watch, is fixing the roof while the sun is shining, but the truth is that the Chancellor is a man with whom we always need to read the small print. He has consistently missed many of his debt and other targets, and as far as building a secure future for Britain’s learners is concerned, he is Mr Dodgy, whose actions are unlikely to get a certificate from the Federation of Master Builders. While the sun is shining, he has dislodged slates on the way down and has disguised cuts to adult skills as efficiencies, as his Newspeak officials call them.

He is pushing those students off the ladder of social mobility. It is time for him to get real in the real world, where the elasticity of demand eventually snaps and where stretching the envelope can finally break it. The direction of travel is threatening to deliver not a northern powerhouse but a northern poorhouse, undermining his regional strategy. We want no part of the narrative of failure, nor should this House, and that is why this afternoon we are calling again for Ministers to think again, to support the motion, and to annul the misguided regulation that this Government tried to hide away.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Before I call the Minister for Universities and Science, from whom the House will want to hear and who will need to treat of these matters in proper detail, may I gently express the hope that the combined effect of the intellectual powerhouses on the two Front Benches and their enthusiasm for communication will not succeed in crowding out Back Benchers? We have also to hear from other distinguished intellects later in summing up the debate, and I hope that the product of their grey cells will be meaty but not too big.