Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Emma Ann Hardy (Labour, Centre-left): I should start by declaring an interest: I am still paying off my student loans. Student fees will always be an emotive issue, but I believe that everybody on both sides of the House wants the same outcome. We all want an education system that allows every child to reach their potential and equips citizens for life and work in our country Some Members argued that the staggering debt that students leave university with is notional, but considering that I have been paying mine off for 15 years, I can assure them that it does not feel notional. It feels very real indeed, and I am sure it feels very real for everybody else in the UK who is still paying off their student debt in the same situation I am mindful that we are discussing heaping debt on people who might never earn enough money to pay it off, yet every one of us earns nearly three times the national average salary. During my two maternity leaves, I saw my student debt increase each year because the interest kept being added while I was not earning enough money to pay it off. For people who have not been on maternity leave, I can tell them that it is financially difficult, and people can struggle. It is incredibly demotivating and demoralising to see a debt from going to university and trying to get on in life constantly increasing. I assure the House that my constituents, too, feel demoralised at seeing their debt increase. Members might say, "It doesn’t matter. If they don’t earn more than £21,000, so what? They will never pay it off," but if they got a statement each month telling them that the money they owed was going up and up, that would make them feel demoralised, dejected and fed up with their life I am looking forward to working with the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), who is unfortunately no longer in his place, on the Education Committee, and I agree with him that the interest rates are appalling. How can it be justifiable that they are so much higher than the Bank of England base rate? To show that the unfairness of the high interest rates is even worse than that, someone contacted me the other day and said, "Do you realise that they start adding interest to student loans from the moment you start university?" Students’ debts increase while they are still studying at university—they have not even graduated. How is that fair or justifiable One of the best things we can do to help universities with funding—I hope the Minister takes this on board—is to encourage overseas students to come to our country and pay for our university education. I hope the reality of our universities’ funding problems will break through Conservative Members’ ideological aversion to overseas students coming here I am concerned about the reduction in the number of part-time and mature students. I believe in lifelong learning. I think everybody should have the opportunity to go to university at a time that suits them. Let us be honest: it is often women with caring responsibilities who study part-time at university. They will miss out, and I think that is a travesty. We should look at that issue I am sorry, but I do not buy the idea that more people from deprived backgrounds are going to university and we have tuition fees, so having tuition fees mean that more people from deprived backgrounds go to university. That is rubbish; that is correlation, not causation. The Government cannot say that increasing tuition fees means that more people from deprived backgrounds go to university. That is total nonsense Let us be honest: the current model of ever-increasing tuition fees and student loans does not work for students or our universities. Because so little is repaid, I do not believe it works for the Treasury either. It is time to consign tuition fees to the same bin the Government dumped their election manifesto in.