Danny Beales

I welcome the opportunity to discuss the student loans system. I took out a student loan under the plan 1 system. I am, fortunately, not young enough to have benefited from a plan 2, or, now, a plan 5 loan. However, despite having graduated with about £40,000 of student debt, I did consider myself fortunate—fortunate that I went to university under a Labour Government who had widened participation in higher education and created a fees, grants and loans system that enabled me to go to university and pay my living costs, which my single-parent family would not have been able to do without the grants that were, unfortunately, then cut by the Conservatives. I was happy to contribute towards my university education on the basis that most people at my school would not go to university, but a system that was one of contribution and fairness has become an aggressive system, and I believe it is time to review the plan 2, and now plan 5, loans systems. I have heard from many of my constituents about the system as it is operating, including those at Brunel University. Recently, a teacher told me about the challenges of repaying her loan and how she is considering going part-time as a result of high interest rates. There are clearly a number of options that could be taken, such as changing the RPI basis to a CPI basis, capping lifetime interest costs and uprating the thresholds once again. Suggestions have also been made by the Good Growth Foundation. It is important that, rather than going for any one of those changes, we properly analyse the options and the distributional impacts—work which the Conservative party clearly did not do given the half-baked proposals before us. It is quite baffling that the Conservatives moved this motion. Having been the architects of this regressive student loans system, having maintained the system for a decade, having continually frozen the repayment thresholds, and having trebled the fees when in coalition with the Lib Dems and cut maintenance grants for the poorest, they now pretend to be the party of students. However, the mask has slipped in the last section of the Conservatives’ motion. They plan to pay for their minor change by reducing the number of people going to university. When they say that fewer young people should go to uni, they almost never mean that they should not, or that their children should not, and they do not mean that the universities in their constituencies should close. They are talking about other people, including those at universities such as Brunel in my constituency. They look down on the arts or “ology” courses that they feel have less benefit, and to be frank, that is elitism.