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Sale of Student Loans Bill

Indeed. The obvious answer is that it would be done for foolish or speculative reasons or on the calculated basis that the purchasers would make money. For most of us, if we try to move our debts around, we do so to avoid or reduce costs. People do that when they reschedule their mortgages or move their credit card debts between different companies. However, in the context of the transfer of student loans, we are offering the prospect of transferring those debts from the public sector—the Government—to the private sector, which must envisage opportunities to make money out of the process. We, as the Government, have a duty to protect students who have entered into debt in the first place. The guarantees and protections of the students and the taxpayers, of whose interests we must take account, must be clearly bolted in position. My current difficulty is that I cannot see those belt-and-braces protections. It is clear from the comments so far that prospective purchasers cannot hope to make money through taking on increased risk because, as Opposition Members made clear, there will be some selection in the process to minimise the risk. It will be hard to justify the notion of selling the debts below value because a risk element will be built into the calculation. On the first tranche of student loan sales, the then Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Mudie), conceded that the loans had been undervalued. He said in response to a question on 9 March 1999:"““The estimated cost to the Government of selling these loans will therefore be in the region of £85-£100 million or 25-30 % above the cost of keeping loans in the public sector over the lifetime of the portfolio.””—[Official Report, 9 March 1999; Vol. 327, c.106W.]" That estimate was made of the increase in cost of transferring the loans from the Government to the private sector. It would be a somewhat strange and curious transaction if we sought to make those transfers at a cost, rather than at a benefit. I am therefore looking to the Minister to clarify that we will not expose people to predictable additional costs to themselves, or to losses as taxpayers, through the three most obvious ways in which people can make money from the transaction. The first way in which the banks could make money would simply be to do nothing, if the debts of the student loans are transferred at below their real asset values. The banks could then just sit on the debts, which will appreciate, because at some point they will be realised at their true market price. The second way would be to sell the debt at a higher price to another bank, so that the selling bank would make an immediate profit and the buyer would take on the cost of the risk. Again, that would happen only if we as a Government sold the debt at a below-par valuation. The third way of making a considerable gain out of the process would be to have the ability to increase the interest rates being charged on the loans. That would transfer the risk to the students who had entered into those loans, at what they thought were guaranteed and defined interest rates. Failing to lock in a binding obligation to adhere to the original terms would leave the debts open to quite an attractive speculative purchase on the part of the banks, which would know that we as Government might walk away not only from the management of the loans, but from the protections that were attached to them, in terms of interest rate guarantees. If the House fails to put in place those guarantees, we risk creating a huge potential to discredit the student loans system as a whole, because those who enter into those loan agreements need to be able to do so in the belief that what we say the terms of the loan are will indeed be the strictly adhered-to terms of that loan. If people believe that those terms are only the opening gambit and that they could in future face serious increases in the cost of servicing those loans, either they will be saddled with huge debts that they might not be able to service or the prospect of such increases will act as a deterrent against people taking on those loans and accessing the university system in the first place.