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Employment, Universities and Skills and Housing

I am full of sympathy for the hon. Gentleman. The world has changed since then, and many more young people are going to university. We celebrate that fact. Of course, the number of young people going to university surged during the years when we were in government. The hon. Gentleman's intervention was not as helpful as I had hoped, because he diverted me from my line of inquiry. Not only Conservative Members but families throughout the country are entitled to know how many fewer young people will get maintenance grant in 2009 than in 2008. We believe that about 40,000 students will no longer get any grant at all compared with the 2008 regime, but we also need to know how many will have a reduction in their grant but still get some of it. There are various estimates going around. We have tried to work it out with the limited resources of Opposition, using the information that is already publicly available. The Secretary of State set out the detail of how the taper is going to work, and we have the provisional figures for the Student Loans Company. It is possible that a further 80,000 students or more, adding up to 120,000 per year, will lose out compared with the previous regime, which over the three years as we get up to a full complement of students means that 360,000 students will lose maintenance grant compared with the 2008 regime. If the number is as great as that, it is hard to see how it is possible that two thirds of students will still receive a grant. One of the things that surprised me about the Secretary of State's remarks was that he implied that he still believes that that will happen. On our calculations, that seems most unlikely—we believe that the proportion could be significantly lower under the new regime. Regardless of what one thinks about the announcement that the Government made in 2007 and the financial crisis that they have faced since, surely Members in all parts of the House are entitled to an answer to this simple question, which the Secretary of State seems to have a phobia about answering and has yet again failed to answer. Every time that happens, it confirms our suspicions that large numbers of families are losing out compared with the regime that he proudly announced in his first week as Secretary of State. We should all expect as a minimum that he comes clean on that. What we have in the Government's proposals in the Queen's Speech is not reform but change—endless change on the previous structures that the Government themselves put in place. We have seen the failure to achieve more real apprenticeships linked to employers at level 3; the failure of Train to Gain, which should be refocused to provide more financial support for apprenticeships; and the failure to achieve the Government's targets for participation in higher education. That is why Conservative Members have no confidence in this Government's ability to achieve the improvement in skills, education and training that the country so clearly needs as we head into what could be a very severe recession.