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Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2008

My Lords, how does the noble Baroness know? She does not know the individual case histories and nor does her department. The department has not taken the right thing to do for these individuals into consideration in drawing up its regulations. It did not even know how many individuals there were: the noble Baroness was only able to tell me yesterday how many were involved, and has given me further information today. In correcting what I think the whole House agrees is an anomaly that needed correcting, it is important that Ministers’ wishing to move fast does not involve trampling on the efforts of many others, in other departments and the voluntary sector, to try and make society better and save it larger amounts of money in other ways in the future. One of these young men, or whoever they are, going wrong in the future will cost a great deal more than £20,000. This is an area where doing things carefully and right can save a great deal of money. Hasty regulation is presumably only saving the summer term’s maintenance payments, because they will have already received the amount due for the spring by 28 February. This is not a pattern of regulation-making that I would hope to see repeated. I asked a couple of questions. If the noble Baroness can write to me, I would be grateful. In looking at future plans, the Government have said that when a prisoner comes out, they intend that he should be entitled to maintenance payments for the time that he is out of prison, so that he can move into the university and find some accommodation, pay for books and be funded like an ordinary student when that happens. But what will be the effect of the intended regulations on prisoners already at university who spend time on remand, or who are in prison for a short sentence? Are they, as I suggested, going to find themselves saddled with a debt for accommodation which they have no way of avoiding and for which the Government will deny them maintenance payments? After all, if prisoners are on remand and go back to university, they have presumably not been charged or have been found innocent. People who have done nothing wrong will find a chunk of their maintenance charges shot away if the pattern outlined by the Government so far is taken forward. There is obviously no particular hurry, but I would like to know—when or before we see the next set of regulations—how these students’ interests will be looked after. For the moment, however, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion. Motion, by leave, withdrawn.