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Higher Education

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I shall be very brief. I want to put out a radically different message from those that we have heard so far. It does not represent Government policy or Opposition policy, but it certainly represents a socialist policy. I shall describe where we have come from. When I was a student in the 1960s, we had full grants and no fees. Indeed, my wife was a student at a teacher training college, and she had a full grant on which she could live throughout the year, with no fees. I remember my late father, who was then chair of Barnet constituency Labour party, saying at that time, "It won't be long before we've abolished means testing, we'll all get full grants and it'll be paid for out of progressive general taxation." That is what we looked forward to at that time. Now, we have many more students at university but we have gone way back on that situation, and that is regrettable. In 1998, much to my surprise, our Government introduced a Bill that abolished grants and introduced fees. It was not in our manifesto, and I was one of33 Labour MPs who voted against it. I was very disappointed, and I subsequently voted against top-up fees as well. The National Union of Students has a modest proposal, saying that""university education should be free at the point of use, with graduates giving back to the system depending on how much they earn"—" in other words, through general taxation. That just involves abolishing fees, essentially, and the union also says:""NUS believes that businesses should be expected to make a greater contribution."" If we restored corporation tax to its 1997 rate, which would not be difficult for companies to adhere to, we would have another £6 billion or £7 billion to spend, and that could go straight into higher education. A figure of £1.2 billion to abolish student fees is a small price: it represents about one third of a pence on the standard rate of tax, or about one seventh of our subsidy on the savings of the richest 1 per cent. of people in the country. Those are small sums of money, and if we look at the tax gap, we find that the vast amount of money that is not collected due to tax evasion, tax avoidance and whatever is estimated to be well over £100 billion a year. The money is there if we choose to find or raise it, and we could pay for a fully free system of higher education, with grants for all our students. The hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) suggested that we persuade more people to take up apprenticeships rather than to go to university, but I want to see a world where there is a continuum, in which studying at university and being an apprentice are rather similar. The difference is that if one is an apprentice, one gets paid; if one is at university, one has to pay for the privilege. That suggests that university is something for the affluent middle class, because that is where they pay, and that apprenticeships are for working-class people, who cannot afford to go to university. That is profoundly misguided and wrong. I want to see a world in which students, whatever their social background, have a choice, do not suffer a penalty by going to university and do not feel forced to go into an apprenticeship because of financial arrangements. People should not choose to go to university when an apprenticeship is more appropriate, but mention was made of the student experience, and that varies depending on one's affluence and background. I have often imagined a scene where, at the same university, the working-class students, who do not have much money and have to borrow, work in bars and serve drinks to the wealthy students who do not have to work. Indeed, if one is a student from a less academic background, and one has to spend more of one's time and energies raising money to study, one's performance in one's studies can be damaged, so we should be concerned about the student experience. What is going to happen? Students now leave university with average debts of £20,000, and the NUS suggests that the figure might double in time. That will be a serious disincentive to many. It has also been suggested that the lifetime financial advantage of going to university is starting to taper downwards slightly; it is becoming less financially advantageous to go to university, and the way forward should be the funding of education at every level through progressive taxation. There are countries that do that—Finland, for example, does not charge; everything is paid for by the state in its state education system. That means that everybody has a fair crack of the whip and that nobody has to suffer because of their inability to pay. Those are some of the points that I wanted to make; many of the others have been made already. In conclusion, I should say that in our local town is the university of Bedfordshire. I was chair of governors at the college of higher education that became the university. It is a splendid university that does a wonderful job. Its students are very diverse—a large number come from ethnic minorities or from not traditionally academic backgrounds and many do degrees as adult and part-time students. That is the sort of university that really makes a difference. It does a fantastic job and gets awards for the quality of its teaching and the employability of its students. Just recently it has been expanding research in the STEM—science, technology, engineering and maths—subjects, and it is doing a tremendous job on that. The university of Bedfordshire deserves support, but it is not getting sufficient support at the moment. We should lift the cap on student numbers and encourage all our universities to take as many students as they can in future. That would benefit society, the universities and young people. I hope that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench have listened to what I have said.