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Employment, Universities and Skills and Housing

It is. Like the Secretary of State, I had the excitement of being at the event in central London on the morning when the large hadron collider was turned on. I much regret the fact that, shortly after, it was turned off; we hope that it will eventually be turned on again. The reasons for the malfunctioning of the large hadron collider merit a debate in their own right. I was concerned when one of the scientists at the opening of the collider said that one problem had been that one of the people constructing it appeared to have left a can of lager in the central tube, and that that had distorted the signal. Whatever the reason, we believe in those projects, which are an important part of the scientific research carried out in our nation. That is why the former Prime Minister, Baroness Thatcher, was so right to take the decision that we should back that programme. I turn back to the subject of universities. The Government target was that 50 per cent. of young people should go to university by 2010. Progress towards achieving that target has barely moved upwards since it was set; the figure has been stuck at about 40 per cent. for the past seven years, and between 2005 and 2006 it actually fell. That is another example of the phenomenon of the Government announcing an ambitious target and failing to meet it. I suppose that we should be relieved that at least they did not propose a law that said that everybody should have an absolute entitlement to go to university, even as the Government moved further and further away from their target. There are many reasons for the Government's failure to achieve the target. As the Secretary of State knows, one of my particular concerns is the extraordinary gap that has opened up between male and female participation in higher education. It is great that 45 per cent. of young women now go to university, but the fact that only 35 per cent. of young men do so tells us that our education system has a serious problem of male under-achievement. The Secretary of State disappointed me when the only factual question that we asked in this Chamber about his proposals on maintenance grant, which was repeated so skilfully by my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell), did not get a straightforward answer. It is a very simple question. I have to ask Labour Members this: do they believe that if the answer was in any way encouraging it is possible that we might have heard it instead of the endless evasions and contortions of the Secretary of State? I wrote to him in advance, trying to explain that I would be grateful to receive an answer on behalf of many tens of thousands of families. In 2007, one of the first acts of the new Prime Minister and the new Secretary of State was to announce a new regime for maintenance grant that applies in 2008. Only a month ago, the Secretary of State announced that he was changing the 2008 regime to apply a different regime for 2009, which will clearly be far less generous because many fewer students will get their maintenance grants than would have done had the 2008 regime continued. Universities will now have three different maintenance grant regimes for students who went up in 2007, in 2008 and in 2009. Only this Government could achieve that, but that is what we are going to have. Young people from tens of thousands of families who had already applied to university are entitled to know how they will be affected by these changes, and we are entitled to know how many fewer students will receive maintenance grant in 2009 than would have received it in 2008. Unlike the intervention by the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink), this is not rocket science. It is a straightforward question: how many people, comparing the 2009 and 2008 regimes, will not be getting maintenance grant?