Students: Finance

(asked on 15th July 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much the cost of student finance is forecast to increase in the absence of further policy changes in the next three years.


Answered by
Michelle Donelan Portrait
Michelle Donelan
Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology
This question was answered on 28th July 2020

The department publishes forecasts of higher education student numbers, student loan outlay and student loan repayments in England. The most recent publication, published in June 2019, covers financial years up to 2023-24 and academic years for the same period. These figures are available in the ‘Student loan forecasts, England: 2018 to 2019’, which is available at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/student-loan-forecasts-england-2018-to-2019.

The figures can be used to derive the forecast cost of student finance, as set out in Table A in the attached tables under the policies and economic conditions of June 2019.

The Resource Accounting and Budgeting (RAB) charge is the proportion of loan outlay that is expected to not be repaid when future repayments are valued in present terms. This takes into account the effect of inflation and the estimated cost of government borrowing over time.

The RAB cost is the product of student loan outlay and the RAB charge and represents the long-term monetary cost to government of providing student loan funding

Updates to this forecast will be published in 'Student loan forecasts, England: 2019 to 2020', which is pre-announced for publication in September 2020.

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