Higher Education (Basic Amount) (England) Regulations 2010

Debate between Baroness Sharp of Guildford and Lord Giddens

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, taunted those of us on these Benches with the fact that, in the 2004 debate, we argued for, and gained the right for, Parliament being able to debate any change in the level of fees and fee regulation. This is precisely what we are doing today.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln, I regret the degree to which the present debate over fees has ignored the wider cultural and social benefits that stem from our much praised universities. “Learning is for earning” was one of the headlines that followed the report issued by the noble Lord, Lord Browne. We have to some extent lost the carefully balanced and nuanced approach taken by the late Lord Dearing in his report 13 years ago. The Dearing report suggested that university education has three beneficiaries: society as represented by the Government, the student and industry. That report also suggested that the costs of such an education should be shared among the three.

I have some sympathy with the package of proposals being put forward by my honourable friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in the other place. The proposals have a number of distinct advantages over the present situation. First, what is on offer is undoubtedly more progressive than the current system in that the less well-off—those coming from poor households and earning low salaries—will get a bigger maintenance grant and more advantageous loan conditions than under the present fees system. The richer students, specifically those earning higher salaries, will pay more than under the present system. Therefore, as my honourable friend has claimed, the proposed scheme is more progressive than the current scheme.

I also welcome, as all noble Lords have done, the extension of loans to part-time students, which rights a long-running and major inequity in our system. For much too long, the system of loan and maintenance grants has favoured and given a very positive incentive to students to study full time. The reforms open the way to make our higher education system much more flexible, so that the student can mix part-time and full-time courses and mix distance learning with campus-based studies. In the long run, those changes will transform our university system and make it much more like the American system, which many people wish it to be. In that sense, I agree wholeheartedly both with the Minister, who said that the measure will, in essence, change how universities will move, and with the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, that the measure is a game-changing proposal.

As is now well known, I have some substantial reservations with the package being put forward. Although the new package is, as I have said, undoubtedly more progressive than the current provision, we cannot get away from the fact that, with the rise in fees possibly to as high as £9,000 a year, the size of the outstanding loans on graduation will be larger. With maintenance loans as well as the fee loans, most students will be looking to debts of between £30,000 and £40,000 a year. If two graduates set up household together, the total debt will be from £60,000 to £80,000. Whatever people say about students now being used to debts, the work undertaken by the Sutton Trust and Sir Peter Lampl shows clearly that such a sharp hike in fees may well make students very uncertain about whether they wish to go through to university.

Because the loans will be larger, they will also be less likely to be repaid. Indeed, any person earning less than £41,000 will not even be paying off the interest due on the loans. Only graduates earning more than about £50,000 will pay off substantial amounts of capital. It is estimated by a number of organisations, such as HEPI and the IFS, that something like 50 per cent of graduates will never pay off their loans. Disproportionately, those will be women, who earn less and are more likely to go part-time or to take a period out of earnings.

One good thing about the package being proposed is that, unlike credit card debts or mortgages, when a graduate’s earnings go down the payments will also go down. However, the debt will not go away. For anyone earning more than £21,000, 9 per cent of anything that they earn will be subtracted through PAYE on top of their income tax and national insurance—and that will last for 30 years. If you do not repay your debt, 9 per cent on top of your income tax and national insurance will be extracted from your pay package on anything you earn over £21,000. In effect—my honourable friend has said this—the loan will become a graduate tax of 9 per cent. Personally, I feel that that is a very high level of graduate tax. I feel very strongly that those of us who benefited from having no tuition fees and generous maintenance grants in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, are landing on young people of today—the next generation—quite disproportionate costs in that respect.

My second objection is an arcane point that relates to the financing mechanism. Loans do not come for free and substantial loans will be needed to back up the payments being made to the students. The Student Loans Company is funded by the Exchequer, which in turns borrows the money that it lends to the Student Loans Company. The Student Loans Company will then sell the debt on, on the grounds that one person’s debt becomes another person’s asset. However, because so many students will never pay off their debts, the value of those loans when sold on has to be discounted. The Treasury figure for that discount is 28 per cent, but HEPI, the IFS and London Economics all think that that underestimates the repayment issues. Even if we accept the Treasury figure, the annual cost of fee loans and maintenance loans combined to the Treasury will be roughly £2.8 billion for every £10 billion tranche, so the cost to the Treasury down the line will be just about the same as is being taken out of the higher education budget—£2.9 billion. I find myself asking why we are taking that money out of the higher education budget if down the line we will need to meet that cost, which will be more or less exactly the same. The answer, of course, is that doing so conveniently takes the sum off the current account and, through the Student Loans Company, switches it into part of the capital account that is not part of the national debt. Therefore, the cost is in effect taken off the books. That is very convenient, but it will come back on to the national debt at a later point.

Those are my reservations about the package. For all the merits of the proposed system, I end up thinking that it will be unfair to low and middle income students, who will have to pay 9 per cent on top of national insurance and income tax for a very long time. However, I have very little sympathy with Labour’s position, which I find somewhat hypocritical. The Labour Government introduced student fees after a pledge not to do so back in the 2000s. Not only did the Labour Government set up this loans system that is now being extended, they commissioned the Browne report and set its terms of reference while deliberately ducking from taking any decision on what they would do with the report until after the election. Having rejected the idea of a graduate tax when it was put to them in 2004, they are now arguing that a graduate tax would be a fairer system.

I do not hide the fact that I find myself in a dilemma. There are elements of this package that are very fair, very right and very proper. My honourable friend has lent over backwards to make it into a fair package. However, I end up feeling that there are other elements in it that I do not understand and that are unfair.

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I speak in this debate not primarily as a Labour Peer but as an educator and a former director of the London School of Economics. I have worked in universities the whole of my adult life and in a considerable diversity of universities. I believe that the Government’s legislation will be highly damaging for the university system and, as an educator, I should like to explain why.

The flaws in the legislation come from two sources. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, will forgive me, but the first is the erroneous view of the Browne report that higher education is a private benefit rather than a public good. The right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Lincoln, rightly drew attention to that in a forceful fashion. In contributing to the values of good citizenship and civic culture, the public role of universities ranges far beyond the areas identified in the report. Secondly, the decision to cut the teaching grant by 80 per cent is way in excess of what is necessary or sensible. I do not feel that Labour is being hypocritical in saying that, because the Government must be obliged to look at the proposals again.

No other university system in the world will charge students such a high level of fees with such inadequate safeguards to protect those from poorer and middle-level backgrounds. Comparison has been made with the American system, but the system that is proposed is not like that. We will get the worst of the American system without the safeguards that US universities have. Perhaps I might list those briefly, because they are very substantial and show that the public domain is far more representative in American universities than will be the case in the system that the Government seek to introduce.