Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2015 — House of Lords, 2016-01-25
Topic: Education
Alan Thomas Howarth (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, this policy of removing maintenance grants and replacing them with loans, whichever way you look at it, is reckless. It is reckless fiscally. In the early 1990s, I was Higher Education Minister when the Government of that time introduced the original system of maintenance loans for students in higher education, but we did so on a very carefully circumscribed basis. Looking across the Atlantic to the United States of America, where there was a very extensive system of student loans, we saw how unhappy were the consequences, both financially and in human terms. That approach, taken by that Conservative Government, was reasonable and responsible and is in strong contrast to the approach now being taken by this Conservative Government. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has explained to us how the policy we are now debating is a device to enable the Chancellor to achieve a modest additional reduction in his deficit by 2020—political window-dressing for him, but the price that will be paid is a much more significant increase in national indebtedness in years after that It is reckless financially: the Government are quite deliberately proposing to create bad loans. It would appear that their business model is that of the purveyors of sub-prime mortgages; the fact that they admit it does not make it any better. They intend to dump a poor-quality loan book on the financial system in the future. That is cynical. We expect a Government to act with prudence and integrity in such matters It is reckless in terms of the life chances of people who come from disadvantaged communities, in contradiction to the Prime Minister’s professions. This policy will be socially regressive: Ministers are setting out to tempt with additional cash in hand people who come from lower-income households, knowing very well that such people will leave university with larger debts than their peers from better-off households As the Minister who also introduced the disabled students’ allowance, I feel particularly strongly about the accompanying policy to freeze that allowance. In their equality impact assessment, the Government admit that this policy will bear disproportionately on disabled people, although they say that it will not do them that much harm. However, if you are disabled, a little goes a long way, and I would add that such a policy is surely discriminatory. The whole purpose of the disabled students’ allowance was to enable disabled people to experience higher education on a basis equal with non-disabled people, so it cannot be right to freeze the allowance for disabled students, who are increasingly disadvantaged Those who resist the cash bait will probably do so because they are deterred by the prospect of taking on a substantial additional personal debt. That is extraordinarily retrograde when we know that our economy urgently needs a higher level of skills across wider sections of the population so that we stand a chance of improving our national productivity and competitiveness. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, made an important point about the retrogressive effect of confining to studying close to home students from poorer households who do not want the debt, thus making them unable, unlike their counterparts from better-off households, to avail themselves of the full range of opportunity in higher education The policy is contrary to the whole ethos and principle of the welfare state, which is to redistribute resources and opportunity across the lifespan, so that people contribute when they are able to do so but, when they need support, they get it in health, social security and education—precisely the support that this measure is going to reduce. That is part of the principle of fairness. That principle of the welfare state is what binds us together as a society and, as my noble friend Lady Kennedy said, it is shaming that the Government neglect such a principle The policy is reckless in terms of intergenerational fairness. The Government are intending to ask our children and our grandchildren to pick up the tab for it. They should not behave like that—it is a betrayal of the generations to come The policy is reckless, too, in terms of truth. The Conservative Party did not tell voters in its manifesto at the election last year that it intended to introduce this change. That was cowardly. In this measure the Conservatives are reneging on the commitments made by David Willetts, now the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, to Parliament in 2012—in good faith, I am absolutely certain. He assured Parliament that any financial hardships that might be created by the trebling of tuition fees would be mitigated by the continuing availability of maintenance grants. However, the Government are dishonouring that commitment and, in doing so, they are acting to the detriment of trust in government and respect for politicians The policy is also reckless constitutionally. Here they go again, introducing major change affecting a large number of people, with major expenditure implications, by way of a statutory instrument. That is in defiance of the conventions of Parliament. It is an abuse. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, in the report of his review urged the Government not to leave too much in legislation to be provided for by way of statutory instruments. We know that the negative resolution procedure makes accountability of the Executive to Parliament almost non-existent, and we know—the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, has said this too—that the whole system of parliamentary scrutiny of statutory instruments needs to be overhauled Your Lordships’ House is, in one of its most important functions, a guardian of the constitution. We have not voted down this particular statutory instrument but I believe that, had we done so, we would have been well within our rights, because it is for us, again and again, to prevent as well as we can abuse of power by the Executive. The House of Commons, dominated by the Executive, will never do that reliably; we, at least, have to accept that that is part of our responsibility. The noble Baroness, when she seeks to defend this policy at the Dispatch Box, should blush.