John Denham
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Higher Education Policy
John Denham Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House condemns the failure of the Government to deliver the commitment made to Parliament that £9,000 a year student fees would be ‘exceptional’; further notes that the Office of Fair Access (OFFA) has said that it has no powers to set university fees or determine university admissions policies; notes with alarm the warning of the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills that average fees higher than £7,500 would mean reducing student numbers or further cutting university teaching funding; condemns the failure of Ministers to explain their policies by publishing a Higher Education White Paper; believes that Ministers are putting at risk the success of universities and the future of generations of students; further believes that current policies are unfair, unnecessary and unsustainable; and therefore calls on Ministers, as soon as practicable, to set out to Parliament how they will meet the promise that fees of £9,000 will only be in exceptional circumstances, to guarantee that there will be no fall in the number of university places or further cuts to university teaching budgets, and to outline what powers, if any, they propose for OFFA on determining fee levels and enforcing access arrangements.
I am glad to see the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in his place, although I understand that he is not following the usual courtesy of responding to my opening remarks. I am nevertheless grateful to him for attending the debate.
I make no apology for raising for the third time in an Opposition day debate the dismal record of this Secretary of State and the Minister for Universities and Science on university fees. Nothing is more important to this country’s future than the rising generation of young people, including all those who are working hard as we speak on their GCSEs and A-levels. We owe it to them to give them the best opportunities, to make the most of their talents, the most of their abilities, the most of their willingness to work hard and do the best for themselves. All of us depend on them to ensure that, through their innovation and creativity, this country can pay its way in the world and create jobs in the future. Despite fashionable sneers, we need more people, not fewer, educated at a higher level. That is what is happening in every country with which we compete. Young people will benefit from their higher education, but so will the rest of us. That is why our young people deserve a fair deal and good opportunities.
Under the last Labour Government, the number of students in English universities increased by almost 380,000, and 51% of young women now go to university. Now, however, the ladders of opportunity are being kicked away. The education maintenance allowance has been scrapped, and Aimhigher, which persuaded countless young people that they could go to university, has been scrapped. Sir Peter Lampl of the renowned Sutton Trust said:
“I think these fees are going to put a lot of children from lower and middle-income homes off universities.”
A poll today shows that more than half of final-year students at 14 Russell group universities in England would not have enrolled if annual fees had been £9,000.
For those who do aim high, fees are being trebled—to the highest average fees of any public university system in the world, and all because this Secretary of State decided to cut the higher education teaching grant by 80%, to make most students pay the whole cost of their higher education and to embark on a bizarre ideological experiment devised by the Minister for Universities and Science. It was always a bad idea, but these Ministers have implemented it with truly staggering incompetence: they have lost control and are making it up as they go along. Instead of being open and honest about finances and open and honest about their future policies, they are resorting to veiled and not-so-veiled threats, planning the biggest ever interference in the autonomy of universities.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
If a Labour Government had been re-elected, would tuition fees have risen?
Mr Denham
We have made it quite clear in every debate since the Browne report was published that it would be unrealistic to say that higher education budgets would be untouched by the deficit reduction that we would have had to introduce. However, we have also pointed that if, for the sake of argument, the reduction in higher education spending had been in the order of 10% to 20%, as faced by most public services, we would certainly not have been talking about tuition fees above about £3,800—and certainly not the £9,000 that this Government are implementing.
Since Parliament voted to treble tuition fees in December, Ministers have ensured through their actions that record numbers of disappointed students will be turned away from university this year, with perhaps 150,000 applicants missing out on places. More of the students across England who are studying hard for their A-levels today will be rejected than ever before, because tens of thousands are rushing to avoid the trebling of fees, and because Ministers have already cut 20,000 places for 2012 from the number that Labour had planned for 2010—and that is before any more cuts that may be in the pipeline.
On 3 November, the Minister for Universities and Science told the House:
“We… are… proposing a basic threshold of £6,000 a year, and in exceptional circumstances there would be an absolute limit of £9,000.”—[Official Report, 3 November 2010; Vol. 517, c. 924.]
That was the solemn promise on the basis of which the House was asked to treble fees. The Minister did not say, “Most universities will charge £9,000 or as near as makes no difference”; he said that £9,000 would apply “in exceptional circumstances”, and that is not going to happen. Of the universities that have made declarations, 71% have declared fees of £9,000 and 85% have declared fees of £8,000 or more.
The Minister continues to live in a world of his own. In March he was saying of arts and humanities degrees:
“Most institutions should only need to charge £6,000—or perhaps a bit more once inflation has been accounted for.”
So where are those £6,000 arts and humanities degrees in the most sought-after universities? Where, for that matter, are the £6,000 arts and humanities degrees in less sought-after universities? The truth is that the Minister and the Secretary of State have lost control of the system through their own incompetence. They have created a system in which there is every incentive for universities to charge high fees and virtually no incentive for them to charge low fees, and it is young people who will pay the price. Some will be put off university altogether, while those who go to university will face 30 years of debt repayments, with middle-income graduates paying more money and a larger proportion of their incomes than the wealthiest. They will still be paying off their student debt when their own children have started university.
The Minister is now trying to say that what matters is the average once the reduced fees for some students have been taken into account. How disingenuous can you get? When the Minister promised fees of £9,000 “in exceptional circumstances”, I do not believe that a single Member of the House thought, “Oh—that means that most universities will charge most students £9,000, or as near as makes no difference.” That is not what Members thought; they thought that he meant “in exceptional circumstances”. I do not think they thought that middle-class, middle-income students would have no choice but to pay close to £9,000 a year no matter which university they chose to go to. The Minister’s failure to admit that he got it wrong does him no credit.
Mr Sam Gyimah (East Surrey) (Con)
Given that universities that charge £9,000 will have to satisfy fairly stringent access requirements, will they not be helping the very students whom the right hon. Gentleman says we should be helping?
Jeremy Corbyn
I am sure my right hon. Friend realises that the universities that have not raised their fees to £9,000, such as my own London Metropolitan university, are giving themselves a large financial problem which is resulting—in the case of the London Met—in the loss of possibly as many as 10,000 student places over the next three years, a large number of redundancies, and a loss of access to higher education for students from working-class backgrounds. That is the perverse effect of the Government’s strategy of effectively trying to privatise higher education.
Mr Denham
My hon. Friend has underlined a point that I have already made. Individual institutions have had to make their own choices, but this was a system in which almost every incentive for the vast majority of institutions was to raise fees, and there were almost no incentives to lower them. Given the number of professors of game theory in the universities of England, one would have thought that Ministers could have got a few together and asked them, “What will you do, in practice, if we introduce a system like this?” Every single one of them would have replied, “We will make the fees as high as we possibly can.” The Minister and the Secretary of State are just about the only people with any connection to higher education who are surprised by what has happened.
Of course, Ministers have consistently claimed that fees above £6,000 will be allowed only if tough access agreements are in place. When Cambridge university announced it wanted a fee of £9,000 per year, the Deputy Prime Minister—the man who promised no fee increases—exploded, stating:
“They can say what they like. They can’t charge £9,000 unless they’re given permission to do so. And they’re only going to be given permission to do so if they can prove that they can dramatically increase the number of people from poorer and disadvantaged backgrounds who presently aren’t going to Oxford and Cambridge.”
That sounded pretty clear, but what has Cambridge actually proposed? Its current access target under the current fees policy is to reach 60% to 63% of state school students—not, we should note, poorer or disadvantaged state school students, just any state school students including those from selective schools. What has it proposed in the new access agreement? It has proposed that the target should be not 60% to 63% of state school students, but 61% to 63% of state school students. As the Financial Times put it:
“Cambridge basically reckons it can triple student fees and placate the Government by adjusting the bottom of its target range for state school pupils by one percentage point.”
Does anybody in this House believe that Cambridge will not be allowed to charge £9,000?
The Secretary of State’s guidance to the Office for Fair Access did not request that OFFA take into account past performance on benchmarks or widening participation, nor could it legally have done so. It will be many years, at best, before OFFA can possibly judge whether the new access agreements have been complied with and made any difference to access. Will the Minister for Universities and Science tell the House today how long he expects it to be before OFFA could feasibly sanction any university for failure to comply?
It is obvious that these bungling Ministers thought OFFA had powers it simply did not have. When The Times asked Sir Martin Harris, the director of OFFA, whether Ministers had been aware of his limited powers when plans to treble the cap on fees were approved by Parliament, he replied:
“I think that the powers of OFFA became clearer as this debate went on.”
That is a tremendously polite way of saying, “They didn’t understand what they were talking about,” and he went on to say, for the avoidance of doubt:
“It is very important that everybody understands that OFFA is not a fee regulator.”
Tory peers made sure of that in 2004. In another place, they passed amendments that ensured that Labour’s fees legislation could not allow the very interference that the Tory-led Government are now threatening.
Of course, in theory OFFA can reject an access scheme, but only a stupid and incompetent vice-chancellor would run that risk. Universities just need a rational plan for school outreach work, and bursaries or fee waivers for some students; if they get that right, OFFA’s powers to limit fees to £6,000 collapse, and the university is free to charge up to £9,000. That is the second reason why £9,000 is becoming the norm, not the exception.
The cynical talk of tough access agreements is raising false hopes among students, and now the finances are unravelling. The permanent secretary at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills recently appeared in front of the Public Accounts Committee, and he was asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) about the consequences of fees higher than an average of £7,500. She asked:
“You have a gap, haven’t you, that you are going to have to plug”?
The permanent secretary replied: “Yes.”
The Secretary of State has already made it absolutely clear how he will respond. He told the Higher Education Funding Council for England conference:
“Government essentially has two ways of dealing financially with collective over-pricing: either cutting the teaching grant or student numbers.”
So there will be more cuts in teaching grant, or even more cuts in student numbers beyond the cut of 20,000 from the total Labour planned for September 2010 and the number he will allow in 2012-13.
Frankly, the Government are all over the place on this. On the one hand the permanent secretary says there is a problem, and the Secretary of State says he may cut student numbers or the teaching grant. On the other, he says there is not a black hole. The House of Commons Library has published estimates of the financial shortfall at average fee levels above £7,500. Ministers say they do not recognise the Library figures, so will the Minister guarantee to the House today that the average fee will be no more than the £7,500 first promised? If he cannot guarantee that, will he tell the House what the black hole will be, and how he is going to balance the budget?
That is not the only question about finances, because the whole fiasco has been driven by the Secretary of State’s claim that he needed to sacrifice higher education to cut the budget deficit. There are increasing concerns that the policy will not save any public money. The cut in teaching grant has to be set against the massive increase in the level of student debt that has to be written off because of loans that will never be repaid. London Economics, million+ and the Higher Education Policy Institute are among the organisations that have pointed out that quite small changes in assumptions about future graduate earnings or the rate of non-repayment would wipe out any savings. Yesterday, the director of the Office for Budget Responsibility wrote to me confirming that the OBR will re-examine the Government’s assumptions once all the universities have set their fees.
As it has become increasingly clear that fees approaching £9,000 will be the norm, Ministers have constantly threatened to enact new laws to stop them. In their guidance to the Office for Fair Access, these Ministers said that
“if the sector as a whole appeared to be clustering their charges at the upper end of what is legally possible, and thereby increasing the pressure on public funds, we will have to reconsider what powers are available, including changes to legislation, to ensure there is differentiation in charges.”
They have talked of cutting all university places by 5% to 10% and then auctioning them off to the lowest bidder, including foreign-owned private universities. They have also talked of strengthening OFFA’s legal powers, but part of this disgraceful situation is that they make threats but they will not publish any details.
So I ask the Secretary of State and the Minister for Universities and Science whether, having said that they are prepared to legislate to stop universities charging high fees, they will stop hiding behind weasel words and tell us what they actually propose to do. Will there be an auction of student places? Is OFFA going to be given powers to set fees or impose quotas for students from different backgrounds? There are people on both sides of the House who would like to have the answer to that question. Does the Minister have any idea how he would get such a policy through the House of Lords, given that the Lords insisted on explicitly limiting OFFA’s powers in 2004? It really is not good enough for the Secretary of State and his Minister to keep making it up as they go along.
The Minister said that he would double the level of student loans available for study at private universities and he has made it clear that he wants more competition from private universities, but he has not set out how they will be regulated, how quality will be maintained or how the problem of fraud, which is being investigated by congressional committees in the USA, will be avoided—this involves the same companies he wants to expand their activities here. Once again, veiled threats are being made in panic as Ministers lose control of the system, but we are being given no details, no substance and no openness. It is not good enough to keep this House, future students and universities in the dark about what they plan to do.
Let me turn now to another aspect of Government policy that is becoming clear. The Secretary of State and his Minister plan to force tens of thousands of students from squeezed-middle homes to pay a levy to cut the fees of other students, often those from similar backgrounds. In a typical access scheme—hon. Members can go on websites to look at these—a student with two working parents both on £24,000 a year will pay a full £27,000 a year in fees, but that will include a £3,000 levy to cut the fees of the student from next door with one working parent on £24,000 a year. So two graduates with the same degree from the same university starting the same job will start their working life with as much as a £9,000 difference in their level of debt. How many of our constituents will think that having two hard-working parents should be a disadvantage that stays with someone for 30 years?
Mr Denham
I am flattered by the hon. Gentleman’s remarks. No system of student payment for the cost of higher education makes easy the problem of an 80% cut in teaching grant. The fundamental problem we face is that the Government have decided to make most students pay the entire cost of their higher education. The great advantage in a system of repayment of moving towards a graduate tax is that it is fairer; it ensures that what people pay is better related to what they are able to earn as a graduate. But nobody should be under any illusions: the fundamental problem we are dealing with is not the choice between a graduate tax and a fees system; it is the choice between slashing higher education teaching grant by 80% and not doing so.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend share my concern about a matter that was brought to my attention by a constituent? She is so concerned about the level of fees that her children will have to pay for the rest of their lives if they go to university that she is looking into retiring early to prevent them from being burdened with them. That could be an unintended consequence of this policy across the board—people could be incentivised not to work.
Mr Denham
Although this does not apply to the case that my hon. Friend raises, she has touched on an issue that will need to be examined in greater detail on another occasion. It has long been an oddity that the incomes declared to the Student Loans Company by those applying for loans appear to be rather low if they are set against the statistics about the social class from which people come. There is a financial incentive for minimising declared income when applying to the student loan system, and we must acknowledge that that was present to a degree under our system, too. Any sensible person will have real concerns that as fees rise towards £27,000 for a typical degree, with possible significant differences in the maintenance awards available and significant fee advantages for declaring a lower income, the temptation creatively to declare household income, shall we say, may well rise.
I think that it is a tragedy if, in a legitimate way, people take a household decision that takes somebody out of the labour market to enable somebody to take advantage of such opportunities. I am just flagging up this point without developing it further, but there is an issue here that the whole House will have to consider in the years to come.
Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)
Does the shadow Secretary of State not understand that he is fuelling fears for those who wish to go university by constantly referring to what students have to pay? They do not. In the words of a former Home Secretary, it is graduates who pay and who benefit. That is the difference. I suggest that the right hon. Gentleman thinks carefully about the damage that he is doing to the potential of young individuals.
Mr Denham
With due respect to the hon. Gentleman, I shall read back to him directly the words I spoke before I took those interventions: two graduates with the same degree from the same university starting the same job will start their working life with as much as a £9,000 difference in their level of debt. That is an accurate representation of the system that there will be and of the current system, in which, as Government Members do not understand, fee repayments start after graduation. The issue, however, is that students—those planning to go to university—are being told that they will be responsible in most courses for footing the entire cost of their university education. That is undoubtedly true.
Mr Denham
I am going to make a little more progress, because I am aware of Madam Deputy Speaker’s strictures about time and I need to draw to a close very quickly.
Let me complete the point I was making about the unfairness that is being introduced into the access system. Labour’s progress on social mobility must be maintained—[Laughter.] There is laughter from those on the Government Benches, but let me remind Ministers and the House that under the previous Labour Government the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university increased every single year after the changes we made to higher education. We will wait to see whether this Government can maintain that progress.
These Ministers have put the burden unfairly on the shoulders of hard-working squeezed middle families and the Commons Library suggests a significant risk of no overall increase in money spent on widening access because schemes such as Aimhigher have been scrapped and the widening participation premium is in doubt. That risks the worst of all worlds: middle income students and their families being asked to pick up the tab, with no increase in spending on widening access.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
First, will the shadow Secretary of State confirm that, under Labour, a widening of participation did not occur in the Russell group universities? Secondly, if he is concerned about those on middle incomes, is not the answer for him to say that universities should offer no fee waivers, because if there were none, the inequity that he suggests will follow would not happen?
Mr Denham
This is bizarre. The right hon. Gentleman is the Government’s access tsar, but he is asking, “Why do not we all agree that there should not be any fee waivers?” Because it is a requirement of the national scholarship programme that there should be fee waivers. That is the scheme that he has advocated, designed and developed.
The right hon. Gentleman has been as guilty as anybody of raising false hopes about what the Government’s policies are going to do. It was he who said there was going to be
“a really tough regime that does not allow any college or university to charge more than £6,000 unless it is in exceptional circumstances”.
The truth is that he is one of those who have no understanding of how the system operates. I hope that further progress is made on widening participation, including in the Russell group universities. However, nothing that Ministers have set out, and nothing that the right hon. Gentleman has said, matches the rhetoric that he has been putting all over the newspapers. He has played a role in trying to persuade the media in this country that the Government are serious about social access while doing absolutely nothing to deliver on that. He should be ashamed of the role that he has played. He knows that he should have voted against the measures in the first place but he was bought off with a title and he has done nothing to deliver on the responsibilities he has been given.
The Government have broken their promise on the level of fees. They have made claims about access they cannot deliver and they have based their arguments on savings that may never materialise. They said that they wanted to set universities free but they are planning the biggest attack on university autonomy in history, and the sad truth is that all this was not only predictable, but was predicted. From the outset, the Opposition have said that the Government’s policy was unfair, unnecessary and unsustainable. We called for a delay in the fees vote and said that the House should not vote before the Government were clear about how they would control student numbers and how private providers would be regulated. We wanted them to give details about the cost and fairness of the new loans system and to be clear about having an independent assessment of the effect of their measures on social mobility, but they ignored us and four months later they have still failed to answer those crucial questions. In January, the Minister for Universities and Science told the House:
“We are consulting students, universities and other experts and will publish a White Paper in the early part of this year.”—[Official Report, 13 January 2011; Vol. 521, c. 421.]
It is nearly May and there is no sign of this White Paper.
England’s higher education system is not perfect, but it is widely recognised as one of the best in the world. That is not just because of the quality of its world-class research institutions but because of the diversity and quality across the whole higher education system. No one should be afraid of having an honest debate about how it can be made better, but it is so important to all our futures that it needs competent Ministers who are capable of protecting all that is good about it.
Public concern about the Government’s NHS reforms has at least forced a temporary period of reflection on that policy, but no such luxury exists for students and universities, which are on a tight timetable to introduce the new system for 2012-13. The Secretary of State must act now, so will Ministers tell the House today what action will be taken to deliver the promise that fees of £9,000 will be charged only in exceptional circumstances? Will they legislate and if so how and when? Will they promise that there will be no further cuts to student numbers and no further cuts to spending on the teaching grant, research or public funding for widening participation? What will they do to deliver the wild promises of widened participation and improved access? Will they strengthen the powers of the Office for Fair Access to set fees or to impose quotas? If the measures, which are the biggest interference in university autonomy in history, are rejected, what will they do? If the Minister for Universities and Science cannot answer these questions, the House must conclude that he and the Secretary of State have lost control of the policy for which they are responsible.
Mr Denham
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, but does he accept that the Government have not told us how they intend to allocate student numbers—or indeed whether we will have a model in which the money follows the student or whether numbers will be centrally allocated, as they are at the moment? The Opposition called for that information before December, so does he share my regret that Ministers have completely failed to answer that question? Indeed, the lack of an answer means that we do not know whether the hon. Gentleman’s point is valid or not.
Mr Wilson
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for making that point, because there are certainly questions still to be answered, which is something I will come to.
I am concerned that the restrictions on student numbers will mean that we fail to realise the full benefits of competition in the higher education sector, which would have encouraged universities to achieve greater efficiency and offer more value for money. As a recent report by Tim Leunig for the think-tank CentreForum put it,
“because government restricts the number of students that each university can take, this is not real competition”—
and indeed, it is not. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Minister will agree that the Government must devise a system in which universities and courses that are popular and economically important can expand, if necessary at the expense of unpopular courses and institutions. Does he therefore share my concern that capping student numbers will threaten one of the key benefits offered by the Government’s reforms? What further action does he propose to take to ensure that courses that students want to take, at a price that they want to pay, can expand at the expense of courses that they do not want to take, at prices that they do not want to pay? In these difficult times the Treasury is keen not to spend more on subsidies for students than it absolutely has to, which provides the Secretary of State and the Minister with a big challenge if they want real competition in the higher education sector. If the Minister cannot convince the Treasury that removing the cap on student numbers will reduce overall HE costs, there will be no genuine market in HE.
However, I hope that the Government are thinking creatively about seeking micro-solutions to the problem. In particular, I would recommend that they look at three areas that are perhaps worthy of further consideration. The first is how we encourage private sector institutions to enter the HE sector and offer degree courses. There is no reason why they should not be allowed to enter the sector and overcome any real or perceived barriers to entry, which can easily be removed. Secondly, the further education sector needs to be encouraged to offer more degree and higher education courses. The changes that we have made in the HE sector offer huge opportunities for FE colleges to offer high quality, affordable, specialist courses. Once again, we can look across the Atlantic at what is happening in the US community college system as an example of the model that we need to strive to follow in this country.
Mr Hayes
I will not give way again, as time is short.
The previous Government defended both the extra independence variable fees gives institutions and the principle that universities should justify the fees they charge. That is why this debate on the future of higher education is, above all, about three things. First, it is about securing a settlement to fund higher education that is sustainable. The right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) is right: the deficit was not the context when Browne began, but it certainly was the context when Browne reported. The previous Government recognised that we had strategically to rethink university funding to give them sufficient funds to compete with the best. That was acknowledged by the right hon. Gentleman when was the Minister and it is acknowledged by Conservative Members.
I think it would serve the Labour party if that was acknowledged once again. It was hesitatingly and falteringly acknowledged by the shadow Secretary of State, but he has to answer this question: if the reduction in BIS spending on higher education had been of the order he suggested—around 8% to 10%—where would the cuts have fallen? Would basic skills have taken the hit; would it have been adult and community learning; would it have been apprenticeships; or would it have been further education? Let us face it, we cannot have it all ways—yet too often the shadow Secretary of State tries to do just that.
Mr Denham
The answer is, of course, that the BIS team, including the hon. Gentleman, conceded this huge cut in higher education and offered it up to the Treasury. It is not a matter of choosing one cut or another. A BIS team of any credibility or influence would simply have said that an 80% cut in higher education teaching is unsustainable, unnecessary and unfair. It is the failure of the ministerial team to deliver that is at the centre of this debate.
Mr Hayes
The hon. Gentleman’s predecessor, the noble Lord Mandelson, was first to the table when it came to volunteering to cut in his Departments. He took more hits when he was in BIS than any other Secretary of State. It is not credible for the right hon. Gentleman to claim that, had Labour been elected, it would not have faced exactly the same challenges or, indeed, not have employed exactly the same approach to deal with them.
The second big issue is whether this system is progressive. The right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) made the point very clearly: there are no up-front fees; no repayments until someone is earning £21,000; and debts are written off after 30 years. This is a more progressive, fairer system than the one we inherited. Frankly, no one can honestly deny that. Indeed, it has not been denied, even by Labour Members. A graduate on a starting salary of £25,000 will repay around £30 a month under the new system and we know that graduates typically earn about £100,000 more than non-graduates over an earning lifetime.
The third key point is access. No one is a greater champion of widening access to higher education than I am—with the possible exceptions of my right hon. Friends the Minister for Universities and Science and the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. Widening access, however, is not just about fees. It is about the patterns and rhythms of higher education study matching the patterns and rhythms of more kinds of lives. That is why the changes to part-time provision are so important and why the White Paper—for the record, it was published in June—explains how we will look to provide more higher education in further education colleges, look at more modular courses, more distance learning and more part-time provision. That is exactly the way to get more under-represented groups into higher education.
Today, we have heard from the Opposition a critique of a policy that is very close to what they might well have had to adopt in similar circumstances had they been in government. What we have not heard, however, is their alternative. I believe it ill befits an Opposition to table a motion when they have no real alternatives—