Miliband attacks tuition fees policy

Labour leader says ‘unravelling’ fees policy could see places cut to make up funding shortfall At least 10% of university places for undergraduates will have to be cut to fund the coalition’s “unravelling” tuition fee reforms, the leader of the Labour party has warned. Ed Miliband said ministers would be forced to axe 36,000 full-time places each year. MPs voted in December to raise tuition fees from £3,350 a year to £6,000 in 2012, and up to £9,000 in “exceptional cases”. Willetts initially predicted that the average fee would be £7,500. He later revised that to £7,500-8,000. However, almost three-quarters of universities that have announced their tuition fee plans have opted to charge the maximum £9,000 for at least some of their degree courses from 2012. The average fee of those that have made their plans public currently stands at £8,679.20. This leaves the Treasury with a multi-million-pound blackhole. The initial cost of students’ fees is borne by the government, which pays the fee for each student in the form of a loan. The government then recovers its money once a student has graduated and is earning more than £21,000. Labour said one way for the government to claw back the higher upfront cost would be to cut student numbers. The party said House of Commons library figures showed that if average fees were £8,500 in 2014-15, the government would be short of £450m. To keep public spending constant, funds equivalent to 36,000 undergraduate full-time places would have to be lost, Labour said. Miliband told a press conference on Tuesday that the government’s tuition fee policy was “now unravelling”. “It will cost students more. It will now cost the taxpayer more. And it may cost thousands of young people their place at university,” he said. Figures from the House of Commons library published last month showed that if the average fee was £8,600, the government will have to spend £960m more in the next four years. If it is only slightly higher, at £7,900, it is £340m extra. But if the average is £8,900, the government will have to pay out an extra £1.23bn. Miliband made his comments prior to a visit to Leicester – following in the footsteps of Nick Clegg who, before the general election, made the “solemn promise” to oppose any increase in tuition fees during a visit to the city’s De Montfort University. He accused the government of a “second betrayal” and said David Cameron had broken a promise that £9,000 fees would be an exception. “Nick Clegg promised not to raise tuition fees, and now David Cameron looks set to break his [promise] by saying that £9,000 fees would be the exception,” Miliband said. “What’s more, this incompetence blows a hole in the claimed savings in the tuition fees policy.” Miliband said ministers claimed last year that cutting university budgets would save the taxpayer £2.9bn, despite it being apparent that the cost of subsidising higher fees would reduce savings by the end of the parliament to £1.3bn. With most fees now set to be between £8,000 and £9,000, the government would have to pay out even more in loans, he added. He said that if fees came in at the average currently being seen, the cost of loans could cost up to half a billion pounds more annually, reducing savings to well under £1bn. Miliband said some experts believed the system could cost more, not less, in the long run because of fears many loans may not be paid back. “Whatever the exact number, there will be a shortfall in the government’s figures,” he said. “The shortfall in the funding is a double jeopardy for young people. He said the policy was one of several measures “kicking away the ladder of opportunity for young people”. And he reiterated his interest in a graduate tax, an idea being explored by Labour as part of its policy review. Meanwhile, thousands of deprived teenagers are likely to shun university next year because they are misinformed about the government’s tuition fee reforms, a charity has warned. The Helena Kennedy Foundation, which offers bursaries and mentors to encourage the poorest teenagers to go from college to university, said many young people wrongly believed they would have to pay £9,000 fees out of their own pockets when they started their degrees. It warned that teenagers were also unaware that they could qualify for substantial bursaries and scholarships. Ministers must immediately launch a publicity campaign to address the public’s misunderstandings over tuition fees, the charity urged. Wes Streeting, chief executive of the charity, said it was “frankly extraordinary that the government has failed to launch an effective publicity campaign to ensure that potential applicants and their families are aware of the facts behind the new system, particularly that tuition fees will not be payable until after graduation”. “The chaos and confusion surrounding the implementation of the new system risk deterring students, especially those from non-traditional backgrounds.” English universities hoping to charge more than £6,000 a year have until the end of Tuesday to submit their plans to the government’s access watchdog, the Office for Fair Access (Offa) . At midday on Wednesday, the watchdog will publish how many universities have submitted their plans to charge more than £6,000. It will announce which universities’ plans it has approved by 11 July. Bristol University set out its plans on Tuesday to charge fees of between £3,500 and £9,000 a year from autumn 2012. It was one of one two universities in the Russell Group of large, research-intensive universities to not have made their proposals public. The London School of Economics and Political Science has not yet announced its fees. Ed Miliband Labour Education policy Tuition fees Higher education Students Hélène Mulholland Jessica Shepherd guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 19, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.