Rebecca Smith

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz, and to respond on behalf of His Majesty’s official Opposition. I thank the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) for tabling this important debate and all Members for their contributions this morning. I have to say that I did not expect to hear quite so much agreement for Margaret Thatcher’s education policies this morning. I am particularly grateful to the hon. Members for Edinburgh South West (Dr Arthur) and for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon) for their positivity about that. Let me pick up on the points made by the hon. Member for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey). Although I think we are the same age, he started at Southampton University a year after me, but we have many mutual friends from our time at university. It is worth noting that the changes we experienced as the first cohort that had to pay fees and take on a loan were due entirely to the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998, which was snuck through by the new Labour Government and then conveniently forgotten about, in a time where social media did not exist. I dread to think of the furore if today’s students realised that that was going to happen to them, but I for one, aged 16, thought I was going to university for free, but by the age of 18 that was not the case.