Higher Education Fees

Debate between John Leech and Chris Bryant

Thursday 9th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Leech]

That is not relevant to the debate, or to the point that I am trying to make. The proposals mean that the least well-off quarter of graduates will be better off than they are under the scheme introduced by the last Labour Government. However, the flaw that I see in the proposal of my right hon. Friend the Business Secretary is that no one goes to university believing that they will be among the bottom 25% of graduates. Their assumption will always be that they will have to pay off the whole of their student debt, although for a large proportion of them, that will never be the case. I believe that a number will be put off choosing to go to university in the first place.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Leech]

I will not give way a third time.

As I said earlier, I signed the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West. However, I also strongly support the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert). Along with most other Members who are graduates, I benefited from a free education, and left university with a very small amount of debt. I am not about to vote to leave future graduates with tens of thousands of pounds of debt. I hold to the old-fashioned principle that a university education benefits the country and the economy as well as the individual. Graduates who are successful and earn high wages after they leave university pay more taxes and repay the cost of their university education that way. I am therefore slightly disappointed that the amendment to which I have put my name has not been selected and will not be voted on, because that vote would have revealed which Members support the principle of free education, and Opposition Members would have had a chance to show their support for the existing unfair regressive fees system. We are not going to get that opportunity, however.

All we are getting from the Opposition is pathetic political opportunism. The House witnessed that last week, yesterday and this afternoon. The Leader of the Opposition has suggested he supports a graduate tax, but is not prepared to tell us how much it would cost and how many graduates would be worse off under his proposals. This week we are told that the shadow Chancellor has had a road to Damascus-style conversion to the concept of a graduate tax; either that or, more likely, he has had a North Korean conversion to the graduate tax. Both the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Chancellor were members of the Cabinet that introduced the Browne review with the explicit intention of raising tuition fees. Nobody in this House or outside it should be duped into believing that Labour would not be proposing an increase in tuition fees if they were still in government. While I welcome their convenient conversion to opposing a rise in tuition fees, the House should be under no illusion: if they were in government they would be doing exactly the same as what is being done today.

Elections and Returning Officers

Debate between John Leech and Chris Bryant

Wednesday 20th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is a delight to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton, and yet again to gather together this group of hon. Members who take an interest in electoral matters. No doubt we shall gather again this afternoon for the next round of discussions. I congratulate the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing). There are many things I do not understand about the Government, one of which is why she is not a Minister. She is extremely efficient, capable and competent, and she always makes her argument very well. Yesterday she got a little cross with me. I do not take any offence at that, although a lot of people do.

The basic message from the debate, which I hope returning officers will understand, is that many of us who are involved in politics as elected politicians worry that we are taking democracy somewhat for granted. We all worry about the fact that turnout has fallen, as the hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) mentioned. Turnout rose slightly at the last general election, but it is still lower than it was in the 1980s and earlier. Now is not the time to rehearse those arguments, but in Wales turnout was consistently above 75% or 80%. Wales often had the highest levels of turnout, but lately they have been some of the lowest. That is a worry to us all.

It is all too easy for local authorities, which often make the decisions about funding for the democratic process, to take democracy for granted. A local authority might have to choose between keeping a swimming pool open, which will cost £100,000 a year, or doing a full canvass of every house to ensure that everybody who is entitled to vote is on the register, and that everybody who is not entitled to vote is not on it. Elected politicians at local level sometimes choose to protect the swimming pool rather than the democratic process.

I suspect that over the past few years, the whole anti-politics movement—to give it a name—has added to that problem. Too many people felt that all politicians of whatever political party were in it just for themselves, and that there was no point in voting because, in terms used by many comedians, “If voting made any difference, they’d abolish it.” The issue of Members’ expenses also fed into that, and that cynicism has weighed heavily on the political system over the past few years. That has fed into the presumption that money spent on the electoral register or on electoral processes was not money well spent. That is a mistake.

I am sure that we can all remember watching the first time that people voted in South Africa. There were queues not only down the street but round the block for days. People were camping out and waiting to vote. Watching people vote in countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan, where they might have been running terrible risks to do so, fills a lot of us with admiration. In the Balkans, boycotts of elections have sometimes been organised by one ethnic grouping, and it has been great to see turnouts that were significantly higher than many had anticipated. That is why the scenes that we saw in May were sad. It is fortunate—and only fortunate—that there was no constituency in which the number of people who we know were not able to vote was higher than the majority of the candidate who won. Therefore, we can be confident that that issue may not have affected the result.

The hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Mr Leech) makes an extremely good point: we have no way of knowing how many people went to the polling station, saw a long queue and thought that they would come back later. Perhaps they came back later but still saw a queue and gave up.

[Mr Leech]

There is also the fact that there were local elections on the same day. I guess that in some constituencies, the result of the local election in a particular area was very close. It may be that some people were elected to local councils who would not have been elected if everyone had had the chance to vote.

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman makes his point, and I hope that the Minister will be able to answer him on it. I will speak about combined polls a little later.

The Opposition tried to provide an answer to the issue of 10 o’clock voting with an amendment that was discussed last Monday. Unfortunately, not enough hon. Members felt able to vote for it. The Minister said that the problem with our amendment was that it introduced the concept of a queue into British legislation, and that that might be difficult to define. If the British Parliament cannot define a queue, I do not know which Parliament in the world would be able to do so. Many other places in the world have a system in which, for example, a person’s finger is dabbed with indelible ink the moment that they present themselves, and that is the moment at which they are entitled to receive a vote. I am sure that many other ways could be devised. I hope that the Minister will look specifically at a way of ensuring consistency across the country.

The hon. Member for Milton Keynes North made the point tellingly: in some constituencies, the returning officer decided to be generous and to stretch the regulations in one direction, but in other constituencies they decided to be extremely strict about how they operated the system. That inconsistency around the country does not inspire confidence in voters. In subsequent elections, people might think that if it is 9.30 pm or 9.45 pm there is no point going to vote because there are always queues at the polling stations.

I do not want to be nasty to the Minister this morning—