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Comprehensive Spending Review

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and he has considerable experience in this area. The problem with the graduate tax, which we honestly looked at and honestly considered—[Interruption.] Actually, an enormous amount of work was done in looking at the feasibility of the graduate tax, some of it by the previous Government: the shadow Chancellor was the higher education Minister who ruled out a graduate tax, and under the previous Government the education Department published a paper about why it would not work. As I have said, we looked at this idea carefully—we approached it in a genuinely open-minded way—but there were many disadvantages to it. One of them was that it would represent a massive centralisation of the university system with, basically, the Treasury controlling, almost to the last pound, how much different universities would get. That is why, as I understand it, the Russell group of universities—for a start—are completely against it.