Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the impact of the phasing out of RPI in 2030 on the reforms to the student loan system.

The Office for National Statistics is reforming the Retail Price Index (RPI) measure of inflation in February 2030, bringing the methods and data of the Consumer Prices Index Including Owner Occupiers' Housing Costs (CPIH) into RPI. From that point the historic wedge between RPI and CPIH will fall to zero.

We have used RPI as the inflation measure in our reformed student loan plan type, which will apply to new borrowers entering higher education from September 2023 onwards, to ensure consistency with existing student loan plan types, all of which include links to RPI. Annual RPI inflation has historically been around 1 percentage point higher than CPIH.