Higher Education Funding Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Gareth Snell
Main Page: Gareth Snell (Labour (Co-op) - Stoke-on-Trent Central)Department Debates - View all Gareth Snell's debates with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Higher Education Funding
Gareth Snell Excerpts(6 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Joseph Johnson
Of course, excellent higher education is being delivered in our further education system, and the teaching excellence framework results in June highlighted the excellence in HE found in FE providers. On the hon. Gentleman’s question about funding, the Government made available an additional £500 million to support the evolution and development of T-levels, a transformational qualification that will help us to achieve parity of esteem for technical and further education in our system.
Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)
I apologise for being late, Mr Speaker.
The Minister has said two or three times now that student debt should not be considered real debt because it will be written off in 25 to 30 years. Will he or his colleagues in the Treasury publish their forecast of the cost to the public purse in 25 to 30 years of the loans written off as a result of students not meeting their repayments in their entirety? Given that he is raising the threshold for repayments, and so potentially increasing the level of debt, presumably that figure will grow, so he is actually stacking up a burden for a future Chancellor.
Joseph Johnson
As the hon. Gentleman probably knows, we regularly publish assessments of the amount the Government write off at the end of a 30-year period to reflect the fact that they want to make higher education free at the point of access to students. It is called the resource and accounting budgetary charge. Prior to the changes we announced at the party conference, the proportion of the loan book to be written off over that period was approximately 30%, but it will have risen as a result of the changes announced, and we will make the new amount public in due course.