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Higher Education

No, I will not accept responsibility for that. In every speech that I made in the 2001 and 2005 general election campaigns, whether I was talking to schoolchildren or to people in student unions who had already gone to university, I was careful to make the point that if they had the educational attainment and the ambition to go to university, they should not let the prospect of debt put them off, because university would transform their lives. I am sure that all my fellow Liberal Democrat candidates would have said the same thing. I was actually trying to do some of the Government’s work for them, and I continue to do it. However, that does not mean that we can disregard the fact that debt will be perceived by some students as a barrier to their going into higher education, or that it might well skew their occupational choices thereafter. I was talking about the Minister crowing about the UCAS statistics involving the increase in one year. To do so seems rather perverse, however, given that, underneath that statistic, there has also been an increase in the number of teenagers who are eligible to apply to university. We can get lots of good news out of the way in one go this afternoon, because the number of teenagers who are eligible to apply to go to university will increase every year between now and 2011. I am sure that the Minister will therefore have lots of good news for us in the future.