---

Higher Education Fees

I shall develop this point and then take an intervention. What were the options for a Department facing 25% cuts of the kind that the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen himself was going to introduce? Some 70% of all spending in the Department is on universities. He could—and I could—have chosen to make the cuts elsewhere, the largest category would have been in further education. We could have made the choice to cut apprenticeships and skill-level training by a modest amount, but we need to deal with the problem we have inherited of 6 million adults in this country without the basic literacy of a 12-year-old. We could have cut that, but we chose not to. So we were left with the question of how to make cuts in the university budget of about 25%. There were various options-