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Education Maintenance Allowance

Indeed, and I shall come on to that very point. That is why last Wednesday, when I put my question to the Prime Minister, I described Liberata, the company involved, as dysfunctional. It was completely dysfunctional and I will deal with that point in more detail in a moment. I was mentioning the difficulties facing young people because of the problems. In Blackburn, just down the road from my Pendle constituency, it was reported by the BBC and others that Blackburn college had to tide over students with £10 Tesco vouchers. The National Union of Students got in touch with me to say that EMAs were so important for some students that if they did not get them this year there was a real danger that they would drop out of college completely. The delivery failure was of galactic dimensions—it really was. We know from the Minister, who helpfully put the exchange of correspondence between himself and the LSC in the Commons Library, that 111,000 students were waiting for payments on 8 October, but that at one stage the backlog of students waiting for payments was more than 200,000; that was the figure given by Mark Haysom, the chief executive of the LSC, when he wrote to the Minister. The figure is now down to about 12,000, which is good. We can all breathe a huge sigh of relief, and I hope that the remaining 12,000 or so applications can be processed without further delay.