Higher Education Fees

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Thursday 9th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Denham]

I give way to a representative of one of those leading research universities.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

While the right hon. Gentleman is talking about fundamental changes, will he talk about his party, including him, voting to introduce fees and breaking the principle of free education? That is a fundamental change, for which he voted, and he voted for top-up fees against manifesto commitments. Will he apologise?

[Mr Denham]

The 2001 Labour manifesto—I was a Back Bencher at the time, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) was the responsible Minister—ensured that the policy did not come into force until there had been a further general election. That is not the coalition’s proposal.

I am sorry that the Prime Minister has left, because he did his bit yesterday to run down our English universities, saying that they were unsustainable, uncompetitive and unfair. He did not say that they were world class or praise what they had achieved; he could only knock them. “Uncompetitive”? They are the second most popular destination for overseas students in the world, but the Prime Minister tells the world that they are uncompetitive. That is a great deal of help for our universities.

The Prime Minister, however, has some interesting thoughts about overseas students. When he was in China, he told Chinese students that

“we won’t go on increasing so fast the fees on overseas students, because in the past we have been pushing up the fees on overseas students and using that as a way of keeping them down on our domestic students. So we have done the difficult thing in our government which is to put up contributions from British students.”

For foreign students, he said,

“we should be able to keep that growth under control.”

Now we know why the Prime Minister wants to push up contributions—to keep down the price for Chinese students. Extraordinary!

Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that the current model of higher education funding is not providing enough money. Quoting the Browne review, he said that public funding per student is lower in real terms than 20 years ago. We are bound to ask, “How the hell did that happen?” It did not happen under Labour. I can tell the Prime Minister how it happened. Between 1989 and 1997, under the previous Conservative Government, public funding per student fell by 36% in real terms. Who was the special adviser to the Conservative Chancellor at that time? It was the Prime Minister. If he wants to know whose fault it was, he ought to look more carefully in the mirror in the morning.

Now, the Prime Minister is at it again. He was cutting university funding then; he is cutting university funding now. This is a Tory policy of cutting higher education; unfortunately, this time they have Liberal Democrats to take it through with them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

The Browne review takes as its starting-point the changes that the Labour Government introduced in 2004. We all know that those changes were politically difficult, but they achieved two major things: they brought more money into universities and they resulted in a large increase in higher education participation, including and, indeed, particularly among students from poorer backgrounds.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England released figures earlier this year showing that, back in 2004, just one in eight young people from the poorest backgrounds went to university; it is now one in five. Of course there is still a gap in participation rates between rich and poor. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) showed this week, our top universities must do much more to attract a wider variety of students. We did, however, see a big increase in opportunity and participation, following the changes of 2004.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

I tried to intervene on the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) as I wanted to correct some of his figures before he started scaremongering. The university of Cambridge takes 15% of students from ethnic minority backgrounds as compared with 10% across the country. He spoke about the one British black Caribbean student out of the 35 applying who gained admission to Oxford university, but failed to mention the 23 black Africans, the three other black students, the seven white and black Caribbean students, the seven white and black Africans, the 35 others of mixed descent and the nine others or, indeed, those directly from the Caribbean—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Interventions must be a lot briefer from now onwards. That is very unfair to other Members.