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Higher Education Fees

I will finish this section and then take an intervention. There were various options for cutting the university budget. We could have reduced radically the number of university students by 200,000, but all the evidence suggests, as the previous Government used to argue, that increasing university participation is the best avenue to social mobility. We therefore rejected that option and did not cut large numbers of university students. We could have made a decision radically to reduce student maintenance, which would have been easier, less visible and less provocative in the short run. We could have done that, but the effect of that would have been to reduce the support that low-income students receive when they are at university now. We rejected that option. We could have taken what I would call the Scottish option. We could have cut funding to universities without giving them the means to raise additional income through a graduate contribution. The certain consequence of that would have been that in five to 10 years, the great English universities—Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and the rest—would still be great, world-class universities, whereas universities such as Glasgow, which I used to teach at, and Edinburgh would be in a state of decline. We rejected—and rejected consciously—all those unacceptable options.