Amendment of the Law — House of Commons, 2015-03-19
Topic: Education
John Vincent Cable (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I thought it might be useful to take one element of the Opposition’s policies to see how utterly incoherent it is. I want to home in on the particular issue of how they would fund a reduction in tuition fees. To be frank, this is a tricky subject for all parties. All parties, including the Labour party, have gone back on their commitments. My party has done so, and I know that the Conservatives had some embarrassment in 2005. I would have thought that common sense suggested we ought to draw a line under this episode. I know from the feedback I get from the shadow Cabinet that the shadow Chancellor has been a voice of sanity in this debate, but his leader has not listened to him. Clearly, I am parti pris on this matter, but let me read a comment made yesterday by a man who describes himself as having been "responsible for delivery in Downing Street under Tony Blair" I am not sure that I would want that on my CV, but he is very happy about it. Referring specifically to this proposal, he said: "The result would be to spend almost £3bn to subsidise high earners of the future. The present system is attracting more students than ever, especially from low-income families. In 2004, before fees were introduced"— by the previous Government— "14 per cent of the lowest socio-economic fifth…went to university; last year 21 per cent did. Labour’s proposal therefore offers not ‘more for less’ but ‘less for more’." The position is actually worse than that, because we do not understand how it will all be paid for. A £2.6 billion gap needs to be filled to pay for the cap. The original idea was that there would be some kind of granny tax, with grannies paying extra into their pensions. That comes down to the proposal about the pension pot. The proposals that the Chancellor made yesterday diminished considerably the resource available from that source, so where will the money come from? Even if the Labour party can identify where the money will come from, how can it guarantee to universities that the money will get from the grannies to the Treasury to the universities? How exactly will that be sustained in the years ahead This is not just a debating point; these issues really matter. The feedback that we are getting from universities is that they have stopped investing because there is a political risk—although it may not be high—of a Labour Government. Universities have stopped investing and are having to fall back on their reserves. Some universities, such as Cambridge, have said that if this policy were to happen, they would drastically reduce the number of students they admitted and cut back on their supervision. The quality of education would suffer It requires a particular kind of genius to dream up a proposal of such transcendental stupidity. I was going to ask the person responsible to stand up and tell us what it is all about, but the shadow universities Minister is not here. He is the same guy who left the note saying that there was no money left. What he is now proposing is that universities should experience precisely the same treatment.