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London Metropolitan University

The reason why I am so concerned about this issue is that many of the students who have written to me are really in a panic. There may be alternatives, but these students do not know about them. They have often screwed up all their courage and got together every penny that they have to go to university, which is something that they never thought that they would do when they were younger. Now, thanks to a combination of the university's management and the actions of the funding council, the rug has been pulled from under them in what are difficult times for all our constituents. People really are in a panic, and they deserve better from the management of London Met and from Ministers, because this issue has been bubbling under from a long time. Redundancies may be inevitable at London Met, and more may need to be done to improve management there. We may also need to move away from an assumption that institutions can excuse underperformance—whether academic or management underperformance—by pointing to undergraduates' class or race background. That is no excuse for anything. All those things may be true, but I ask Ministers at this point to focus on the students, for whom going to university means so much more than it did even to me, the Minister and other Members in the Chamber. The Minister should focus on the students and stop hiding behind the funding council. He should intervene to ensure that students do not suffer in this transition period and that the funding council knows that it cannot apply one-size-fits-all funding solutions to universities up and down the country whose demographics and social context may be very different. We owe these students something. We should not have spent 12 years as a Government talking about education, education, education. We should not have spent 12 years as a Government talking about skills, the need to go forward and increasing access. Whatever problems it may have had in the past, London Met has reached a crisis, and we have not stepped in swiftly to protect the interests of the students and my constituents.