Higher Education: Affordability and Quality

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, is to be congratulated on stimulating a very good debate. I agree with her fundamentally about freedom of speech and the shocking rise in antisemitism and intolerance in our universities, but I do not agree with the central thrust of her argument: that we should revert to having a more elitist higher education system.

I was a product of the elitist system when, in 1964, I got a telegram telling me I had won a scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford, as only 6% of my age group went to university. I had a great time. My dad was a railway clerk, and I had a full grant with all my fees paid. I went on to do a master’s for another two years—all at the public’s expense. It was great.

However, I think we were right to make higher education a mass model; that degree of generosity to an elite could not be sustained. It was obviously unfair that people who did not go to university paid high taxes for the people who did, and therefore the fee system had a great logic to it.

I had the privilege of being chair of council at Lancaster University for seven years, and there I saw how wonderful this mass expansion of higher education had been. That institution had one of the best equity records among academic, research-intensive universities in recruiting state school students, and it also came out very well in the research assessment exercise. So, in principle, that can be done and we should resist the temptation to go back to a narrowly based elite system.

In our politics, the Member for Makerfield, who is about to become Prime Minister, will recognise that the core of the economic success of Manchester is its university sector and its contribution to the great revival of that city. That story is there right across Britain.

Obviously, there are, as my friend the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, said, no grounds for complacency, and there is something of a crisis. I think we can overcome this. We must not restrict international students. Prioritising immigration control over international students is the wrong decision. There are efficiencies that can be realised in universities; I saw that as chair of council. A small university such as Lancaster should be considering partnerships and mergers. Indeed, on one occasion, I proposed to the University of York that we merge to create a roses university, which would have saved quite a lot of administration. There are efficiencies that can be made. However, I agree with those who do not like the way humanities is being run down. That is not in conformity with my ideal of what a university should be about. The criterion for assessing the worthwhileness of courses cannot be only employability and earning power; we have to recognise the value of people who study the arts, or even theology. That is a very important contribution to society.

One thing that has not been mentioned in this debate is the great need for the post-16 education and training system to be improved. Universities should be thinking about how they can contribute to that. One of the radical things the previous Government did—in fact, it was Gavin Williamson, who I would not normally congratulate—was to introduce the idea of modular courses being part of the lifelong learning entitlement. Universities should be looking at how they can co-operate in partnership with further education colleges to make that a reality.

As my final point, I advise the Government to look at the affordability question, particularly for graduates on these plan 2 loans. I think it is very unfair and is one of the reasons we are finding, in the Labour Party, that a lot of young people are going off to the Greens: if you get a salary of 50 grand a year, you are effectively paying a 50% marginal tax rate. That is not acceptable for people who have spent years devoted to study.

Welfare Reforms and Youth Unemployment

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, on securing this debate and on the largely non-partisan way in which he explained the problem.

I would love to see cross-party consensus on welfare reform, but if we are to get that, I totally agree with my noble friend Lord Walker that it has to examine the challenge of the ageing society and whether we can continue to support the pension triple lock and all the costs of NHS and social care, which, if we are not careful, produce great generational inequality in Britain. Something has to be done to address that.

On the Milburn report, first, I would like to say that it is brilliant. The way in which Alan Milburn and Pat McFadden are going about trying to get positive change in this policy area is an example that the rest of our Government here should follow. They are making a really powerful argument for change with compelling clarity, and we want more of this from our Government. They also make it clear that there are no simplistic solutions to this problem. I agree with Tony Blair that the Government made a mistake in putting up national insurance as a way of raising taxes—we should have done something else—particularly in lowering the threshold at which national insurance is paid, which hit low-paid starter jobs particularly hard. However, changing that is not going to change what is a very complex problem, as the Milburn report has outlined.

Part of this is a classic story of social exclusion, and the Government are doing a lot through Early Years to try to get more children school ready by five. The report demonstrates that it is children who are not school ready at five who are much more likely to be jobless at 18. We are doing good work there. There is also a problem of poor school attendance among the less able children. This is a question of education reform, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker, explained to us; we have to be better not just at training kids to pass exams but at giving them skills. The system is not well organised for that. However, it is a much bigger problem than social exclusion. After all, 30% of NEETs have good GCSEs, 20.1% have level 3 qualifications, and 15% have a degree, so it is not just a problem of social exclusion.

The most interesting part of the report, which was new to me, was the changing nature of the labour market and how the supply of entry jobs has gone down. This has not happened under the Labour Government in the last two years; it is much more of a long-term trend. We remember Norman Tebbit saying that you had to get on your bike to find a job. Nowadays, Milburn tells the rather pitiful story of young people who make hundreds of applications by email and typically do not even get an acknowledgement. So that is an issue.

We have to have more incentives for employers to provide apprenticeships, which have fallen by 35% since 2019. What the Government are doing there is right. We have to have an extended job guarantee, as we had in the early 1980s through the Manpower Services Commission. There are lots of ideas that need to be explored. This is one of the great social challenges of our time, and we must address it.

Child Poverty Strategy

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Liddle]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what progress they have made towards developing their child poverty strategy.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government will publish a strategy in the autumn to deliver measures to tackle the structural and root causes of child poverty. As a significant downpayment ahead of strategy publication, we have already taken substantive action across major drivers of child poverty. This includes an expansion of free school meals, a £39 billion investment in social and affordable housing and a commitment to roll out Best Start family hubs in every local authority.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

I very much welcome what the Minister has said about producing a strategy and the actions in the face of economic difficulties that the Government have already taken, but does the Minister accept that further progress is going to be challenging, given the need to make the benefits bill fiscally sustainable, not least because of the legacy we inherited on PIP, disability and SEND? Does she agree that, in addition to the priority for getting NEETs and people on sick benefits back into work where we can, tackling child poverty by putting extra money into the purses and wallets of our poorest families remains a key government priority?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for his encouragement on what the Government have done so far. It is significant. As he knows, we have already committed to extending free school meals to all children from households in receipt of universal credit from September next year. That alone will lift 100,000 children across England out of poverty by the end of this Parliament and put £500 back in those families’ pockets. That is really significant. But there is so much more to do; my noble friend is quite right about that. The child poverty strategy in the autumn will set out measures across the piece on dealing with child poverty.

My noble friend mentioned the need to make our system sustainable, and he is quite right. There is no doubt that the social security system is not fit for purpose. It is not serving those who need to depend on it and it is not serving the taxpayer, but we have plans to get involved in making sure the system works well. Getting people into good jobs makes all the difference. It will also lift out of poverty the children in those families, so I look forward to doing that and I hope the whole House will support us.

Universal Credit Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 22nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

First, in her absence, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Shawcross-Wolfson, on a very graceful maiden speech. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Elliott, that if he goes ahead with the idea of having meetings of former heads of the No. 10 policy unit, I hope that I, as a mere humble member, might occasionally be invited. Secondly, I would like to say how much I will miss my noble friend Lady Bryan of Partick. We come from opposite ends of the Labour spectrum, but one thing we have in common is a great love of Keir Hardie, who is one of my great heroes. In the context of this debate, I remind noble Lords that his great campaign was for the right to work, not the right to benefits.

The Conservatives left us with a pretty dire situation on social security in 2024. We are going to talk today not about the triple lock, but benefits. We were spending £64.7 billion on incapacity and disability benefits in 2023-24, which was an increase of 40% in real terms since 2013—an increase, not a cut—and it has been forecast that this amount will go up to £107 billion through this Parliament. This is a massive £36 billion increase in five years.

One of the reasons for this is that the number of people receiving the health element of universal credit soared from 2.5 million to 3.7 million under the previous Government, a 1.2 million increase. As my honourable friend in the other place, Alison McGovern, said, it is obvious that the current system is not financially sustainable. The Economic Affairs Select Committee, of which I am a member, did a report on why this has come about. It could discover no adequate health explanation for the rise in the number of people on benefits. What was clear was that the DWP had stopped vetting people properly to receive this benefit. Whereas before the pandemic, seven out of 10 people were given a proper interview, that virtually stopped. The cost of that failure of the system is huge, and I do not think we can go on as we are.

There is another issue that I know is very difficult, but we have created a situation where people out of work on disability benefits are significantly better off than people who work—who flog their guts out on the minimum wage and receive universal credit. We have got the incentives for work all wrong, and this is politically unsustainable. I have spent much of my life campaigning for the Labour Party on council estates, going around the country representing people on three local authorities, all in areas with deprived estates. A situation where people are going out to work full time and seeing people on the opposite side of the street with a considerably higher income is not sustainable.

I support the central proposition of this Bill, which is to equalise universal credit, but it has to be combined with a very strong welfare-to-work programme. There is nothing social democratic or socialist in enabling a young person with mental health difficulties to go on to a lifetime of benefits. We have to move away from that. We have to have welfare-to-work programmes, as we did in the Blair and Brown Governments. That is the key to the future.

Finally, the other reason why we have to tackle the cost of disability benefits is that otherwise, we are not going to be able to tackle child poverty, which, for me, is a much bigger cause: it can lift families out of desperate poverty and enable them to have many more opportunities in life. This is the great cause to which a Labour Government should address themselves, and unless we deal with the problem of working-age disability benefits, we will never be able to afford it.