Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans her Department has to introduce the legislative proposals for the establishment of a Sharia-compliant alternative finance product based on the Takaful model before September 2018.

We are now working to deliver an alternative student finance system following the passage of Higher Education and Research Act 2017.

We will be engaging with experts in Islamic Finance on the detail of the regulations, processes, IT and accounting systems that will be needed to create the new set of alternative student finance products. This detailed work will be complex but we remain keen to introduce the new alternative system as soon as we feasibly can.

We will announce more detailed plans in due course.