Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2015 — House of Lords, 2016-01-25
Topic: Education
Robert Stevenson (Labour, Centre-left): I can answer that—no—but I would like to take a little longer I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, for not spotting him in his place when I started my speech. He must have slipped in. Two brains are obviously much easier to hide than one. I am sorry that he was not there. We have had Hamlet without the prince. Where is the speech? Surely the architect of this wonderful policy, as we have heard it described, should have been there shouting from the rafters. Can I encourage him to rise? No We have had a good debate and I thank all those who have contributed. It could allow us to look forward to further discussions on higher education and, if it does so, allow us to probe some of the assertions of the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, that somehow the garden is blooming, roses are flowering everywhere and higher education is in a good state. It certainly is not. It is time that we got some real discussion and debate going on this It was useful, in another sense, that we got some rather interesting insights into the internal debates under the last Conservative Government from my noble friend Lord Howarth and under the coalition Government from the noble Baronesses, Lady Sharp and Lady Garden, and others. I think there is more to come on that, and I look forward to hearing it as it dribbles out over the next few years This policy does not enhance social mobility; we have heard that echoed all around the Chamber. Despite the good points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, monitoring is not enough. We have heard that the golden ladder of opportunity that is represented by access to higher education will be destroyed, and life-changing opportunities will be removed. We are working on shaky constitutionality: the Minister skated over why we are doing it this way. We may well have fulfilled the letter of the law, but I do not think that we have fulfilled the spirit of it This policy does not save money in the long term, despite the Minister’s assertions. If it is, as seems to be the case, simply a bit of creative accounting, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, called it—I could not possibly comment—to get away with changing the RAB charge in the short term, it is mean-spirited, and leaving it to the burden of future generations cannot be right. Indeed, we are talking about very long timescales, where we really cannot assert what is going to happen to earnings or people’s working lives. Therefore, we are talking about trust. Do we have sufficient ability in looking at this to trust our instincts about it The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and my noble friend Lord Howarth mentioned the intergenerational impact, and that is a real irony. Many of us were the beneficiaries of full fees and full maintenance grants. I would not be here if I had not had that benefit or that chance in my earlier life. I wonder whether the students of the generation that is being disadvantaged by this statutory instrument will ever forgive us for encouraging them to take out the loans and debts for a future that might be so different that it might eliminate the graduate premium that they were promised. Somebody said—I think it was my noble friend Lady Kennedy—that it was shaming to be associated with this policy. I do not wish to be so, and I wish to test the opinion of the House.