Sam Gyimah
Main Page: Sam Gyimah (Liberal Democrat - East Surrey)(13 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Sam Gyimah (East Surrey) (Con)
The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) decided to give us a short history lesson. He reminded the House of the debate on tuition fees here in 2004. That Bill passed by five votes. However, he did not say that, during that debate, we heard the same apocalyptic messages that we are hearing in the Chamber today. The issue then was fees increasing from £1,000 to £3,000. No Government Member says with relish that we should increase fees, but it is important to note that six years on from those debates, 45% of people go to university and 200,000 people want to but cannot go. The hon. Gentleman should therefore have told us that, although we were worried at the time, many of those worries proved unfounded.
Mr Gyimah
May I develop my argument, please?
I listened to the Secretary of State’s argument. I like the fact that he has wrestled with his conscience, flirted with a graduate tax and finally come to the decision that the fairest policy is a graduate contribution. That is in stark contrast to the Opposition, who say that they had the fairest and most balanced solution to the student problem when they did not. What is unfair about the university system they have left us with is that for many people, the costs of going to university outweigh the benefits. That is why graduate unemployment is at 6% when it should not be.
Tristram Hunt
We are having the astronomical rise in fees because of the 80% cut in the teaching grant. We are dealing today with an assault on the entire ethos of the British university.
Mr Gyimah
May I develop my argument?
Why is that outcome important? Unless we understand the outcomes we want from our universities, the debate on fees is totally out of context. I began as a sceptic. I adopted the view that we perhaps needed to row back and have a system that involved fewer people going to university. I thought that a system of grants could be better, or that we could charge less. However, the truth is that higher participation in higher education is here to stay, which is good. We must therefore work out how we can continue to fund that, and how to ensure that our universities remain world class and experiences such as mine at university—if parents cannot contribute, the student is really stuck—are not a key factor in the equation.
My hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) mentioned a mother who is worried that she is unable to fund her child’s education. He is right to raise that concern, because a lot of people will feel that they must dip their hands into their pockets to pay the fees. However, more than anything else, the policy shifts the burden from parents—students pay when they have graduated and when they benefit.
Andrew Percy
The situation is that working class families, who are least able to support their children at university, will bear the additional costs. That was my point.
Mr Gyimah
If any lie has been perpetrated in this debate, it is that working class children who want to university cannot get there—[Interruption.] May I finish? The truth is that our education system is so bad that for a lot of underprivileged kids, the whole concept of university is simply academic.
Mr Gyimah
I want to develop my argument.
Let us look at the proposal in simple terms. Before I went to university, if someone had said to me, “Sam, if you want to improve your life, I will give you money so you can go and do that. When you finish, come back to me only if you have found a job. I’m not going to charge you any interest unless you’re earning more than a certain amount, but I want you to improve your life, so go ahead and do so,” I would have bitten their hand off.
Mr Gyimah
No, thanks.
We have also seen the old notion of class warfare revamped this week. I saw it mentioned somewhere that Harvard had better access than some of our higher education institutions. What was omitted in that article was the fact that Harvard charges huge fees, and that is how it funds access. I am not saying that we want to go the way of Harvard, but there is a way to have high participation and fees and still ensure that the least advantaged make it.
That cannot happen just through fees. We need to reform our education system in total. I am glad that the Secretary of State mentioned the need for further education colleges to get more involved in the delivery of higher education. I am pleased that the 40% of students who are part-time students, who have previously had to fund themselves, will now have access to funding through our current policy proposal. I am pleased also that he mentioned that we will help people make their investment decision about which university to go to, through information about which courses will lead to employment and benefit them and whether they will ever see their tutors. Those things drive equality in the education system.
The motion is purely about fees, but fees are just one part of an entire package of higher education reform. Rather than play politics, we have to examine the whole package before casting judgment on it.
Heidi Alexander
I thank the hon. Gentleman for finally giving way. Does he not accept that for students from poorer backgrounds, the huge debt that they could now face will act as a greater disincentive to go to university than it will for students from more affluent backgrounds?
Mr Gyimah
The truth is that under our current system, it is the middle classes who benefit the most. The people whom the hon. Lady defends are not getting to university, and we need to reform the system so that university is not the same for everyone—three years on campus, costing the same amount of money. There need to be more options for people to get to university over time.
Tony Blair gave an aspirational target of 50% going to university, and I actually like that aspiration. I am glad that, with this policy, we can continue to drive aspiration forward. The past was not right, because there was no utopia of social mobility. The present is letting students down, because they are not getting jobs—
Robert Flello
No, I will not, for reasons that I have stated. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should have voted against the programme motion last night; then I would have given way.
Robert Flello
The same goes for the hon. Member for East Surrey.
Jasmine’s letter continues:
“This generation and the one following are the future of Britain and the government should be investing in them—not making it impossible for people to afford, grow and be educated.”
That is just one of many e-mails and letters I have received.
Is this feeling particular to students or to my students? No it is not. A ComRes poll for ITV said—if I can find it—
Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)
In the short time available to me, I want to focus on the question that really vexes most people in all parts of this House: what effect do the different systems of university finance available to us have on social mobility? Will this Government’s proposals encourage more people whose parents did not go to university to do so? As we have often heard, there are many very strong opinions in this House on the answer to that question. Many Members believe fervently that the fees proposed by the Government will deter people whose parents did not go to university and who come from families on low incomes from going to university. It is also true, as we heard earlier, that some opinion polls suggest that a very large proportion of people say that they will be deterred from going to university. Yet people do not always do what they say they are going to do—[Interruption.] We are all flawed.
I have tried to find research to give us some facts to work with, because projections of what people will do are not nearly as interesting as the facts about what they have done. Several countries operate their university systems on the basis of quite substantial fees, chief among them the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, as well as ourselves. Unfortunately, there is not much research out there that goes into the question of the kinds of people who go to university, but fortunately I have found one such piece of research conducted by a group called Higher Education Strategy Associates. It carried out a truly systematic comparison of what it calls educational equality and it discovered, extraordinarily and against our expectations, that high fees do not deter people from low-income families from going to university.
Nick Boles
My hon. Friend is, as ever, way ahead of me and exactly right. The reverse of what one might have expected is true. In Germany, 63% of the student population—[Interruption.] Please listen to this, because it is important. In Germany, 63% of students have fathers who also went to university. That means that only 37% of the students in Germany are the first in their family to go to university—the figure in the UK is 51%. Only 29% of students in Australia have fathers who went to university. The figure is only 31% in Canada and 39% in the United States.
The countries in which universities make the biggest contribution to social mobility are therefore those with the highest fees. How can that be? I agree that it is counter-intuitive. I will not deny to Opposition Members that that is not how one would expect people to behave. However, it is explainable.
First, such universities have an incentive to expand the number of places, because they receive additional money for each place—enough money to pay for the costs of that place. They therefore massively expand the number of places. That makes it easier for people who have not had huge advantages in life, who have not been able to go to the best schools and who do not have the highest grades, but who are nevertheless huge potential reservoirs of talent, to get places.