Higher Education Reform — House of Commons, 2022-02-24
Topic: Education
Bridget Maeve Phillipson (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the right hon. Gentleman for advance sight of his statement and I join him in his comments about the events that we see unfolding in Ukraine Given that 1,000 days have passed since May 2019, Members might be forgiven for forgetting the recommendations of the Augar review and the context in which it was launched. Concerns about fairness and affordability for students seem to have been lost entirely today. As the then Conservative Prime Minister outlined in launching the report: "removing maintenance grants from the least well-off students has not worked" There has been little sign of any real concern for less well-off students this week. Instead, we have seen the Government’s total lack of urgency about any matter except their own self-preservation; their lack of ambition for our young people; their lack of ambition for our universities; and ultimately, their lack of ambition for our country. This is a Government whose approach to some of the biggest issues facing our universities is simply to kick the can down the road. They are freezing fees, not changing them, and tying interest rates to measures that they intend to phase out, and there is a deafening silence on living costs for students Time and again, this Conservative Government reach for the pockets of working people, with council tax put up twice, income tax thresholds frozen, a national insurance hike and now falling repayment thresholds that will see working people paying more for longer. This Government, who are responsible for a growing failure to support young people to achieve at GCSE, now want to shut people out of university rather than raising standards in schools, slamming the door on opportunity and ambition. As for the lifelong learning loan, which, as the Secretary of State noted, was a core recommendation of the review, why are we waiting even longer for yet another consultation when that was first promised as part of the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill This is not the approach that we need. It will not fit our country to face the challenges of tomorrow. These announcements hold back our universities, our young people and our country. A generation of children has gone through education under Conservative Governments since 2010. Let us consider what their experience has been: real-terms cuts to funding per pupil; secondary school classes at their largest for a generation; hundreds of thousands more children eligible for free school meals; school building repairs cancelled and postponed; hundreds of days lost to the pandemic; botched exam arrangements; and a historic failure to invest in the children’s recovery plan that the Government’s expert recommended and which our children desperately need. As those children now look ahead to university and the years that follow, they will see higher costs than ever before, stretching almost to retirement. This is a generation of children let down from primary school right the way through to university Those decisions are about choices and priorities, but for this Government, our children and young people are an afterthought—an opportunity for a Treasury saving, not the future that we create together. It need not be like that. In Wales, the Labour Government have chosen to focus on supporting students to succeed. They chose to provide extra help on the cost of living and to widen access—two themes missing almost entirely from the statement that we heard Today’s response, for which we have waited all this time, represents a failure by the Government and, sadly, by the Secretary of State. I have a great deal of respect for him and I know how seriously he takes his role, but what we have is 1,000 days of complacency ending in a victory for the Chancellor, not a victory for Britain. There was a failure last autumn to persuade the Treasury that higher education should be central to the economy and success of our country. There has been a failure to rise to the challenges that our universities face and to design a solution, and there was a failure, this spring, to navigate the chaos of a Downing Street paralysed by scandal The people who will feel the pain of this failure and that defeat are not in the Chamber today. They are teaching and learning in our universities. They are sitting in school dreaming of the better future that they deserve and which Labour believes we can achieve. Labour sees their future and our universities very differently from the Government. We believe in matching the ambition of our young people, in enabling university staff to support young people and our country to succeed, and in creating thriving universities at the heart of our towns and cities The tragedy today is that the Secretary of State knows full well that this is not good enough, but he cannot persuade his Treasury colleagues otherwise. Unlike this Government, the next Labour Government will treat universities not as a political battleground, but as a public good, central to the success of our country.