And lo it came to pass.
After how ever many long dull days this interminable election campaign has been going on, the parties have finally been asked a direct question about student maintenance.
Fees and university funding have popped up on all sorts of occasions, but the deep cost of living crisis that many students are surviving through seems to have escaped attention – until now.
And it’s our old friend and ex-LSE SU Gen Sec Martin “Money Saving” Lewis who’s got there.
Martin’s leaders’ debate
It’s a fun little thing that Lewis has been doing since the 2020 election. “”In an election, real-world policies are often lost in the smog of debate”, and so the aim is to try to get “clarity on the practical policies impacting consumer finance”.
We don’t see them fumble an answer – this is more like written parliamentary questions to ministers – so if anything the quality ought to be better.
Each party leader was sent the following double:
- Student living support (the maintenance loan) has seen a substantial real-terms cut, especially for English students, threatening social mobility. How will you change this?
- Are you looking to make other changes to student finance, including tuition fees?
Conservatives
Anyone that’s been reading their Wonkhe Dailies will be familiar with Rishi Sunak’s response – principally because it’s pretty much the stock ministerial answer that is issued every time a back bench MP raises students’ struggles with the cost of living.
First the access boast:
I am proud that an English 18-year-old from a disadvantaged background today is 74% more likely to go to university than in 2010.
This is the most common trap – judging how much to loan to students to live on solely on whether they enrol.
I’m not sure it’s even true. The first sighting of this oft-repeated 73 per cent claim seems to have been results day in 2023 – which appears to refer to acceptance rates on that day and its equivalent in 2010. Last time I looked it was lower once clearing was done – and even then fails to note that the gap between POLAR quintiles 1 and 5 hasn’t really shifted at all.
Next we are reminded that the student finance system “targets the highest level of support at the lowest-income families”, and that there is to be a 2.5 per cent increase in loans and grants for 2024-25.
That’s all true – but as I noted here the other day, doesn’t take into account that the freeze in the means-testing family income threshold means that you have to be poorer and poorer every year in real terms to get the max.
Anything else?
We recognise that cost of living pressures remain, and that is why we have provided additional funding to universities via the Office for Students to support students with hardship funding and will continue to work closely with the Office for Students to ensure that students are supported during their studies.
Yep, just when I thought we’d seen the last of the Magic Money Twig, it gets one last valedictory waggle before it’s burned along with all the betting slips.
We are not planning on making other changes to student finance. We have already reformed student loans so that no one pays more than what they borrowed in real-terms and have frozen tuition fees to balance the needs of universities with keeping costs low for students.
That last line has also been regularly trotted out. It’s amazingly disingenuous – given that by freezing the repayment threshold and lengthening the repayment term to 40 years, the majority of graduates will pay more – not less.
Labour
Good news gang – Keir “knows students have struggled with soaring costs of living under the Conservatives”, and so they’ll ease that pressure in a “number of ways”. That number is… two.
The first is by removing age bands on the national minimum wage so that employers can no longer pay young people less – and for the first time will consider the cost of living in setting the minimum wage:
This will make a real difference to students working to support themselves during their studies.
To be fair, there are plenty of students who are earning the £8.60 under 21 rate, and that will help – and let’s not forget the degree apprentices who can be paid £6.40 in their first year.
And on the 21 and over rate, the working assumption is that the answer is code for moving from the NMW of £11.44 to the Real Living Wage of £12.00 (£13.15 in London).
I expect that neither the universities nor the SUs employing student staff will be compensated for the additional wages – but I’m sure the student working the globally recommended max of 15 hours a week will welcome the extra £8.40.
The other one is “we’ll also drive-up standards in rented accommodation, requiring landlords to make homes cheaper to heat and saving renters £250 a year on average”. As we saw when energy whizzes were delivered during and post-pandemic, even if that does work it’s landlords who mostly (and in PBSA pretty universally) operate inclusive bills that will pocket those savings. They’ll probably pass the costs of making the energy saving investments onto their tenants too.
Starmer also says Labour will “tackle the high cost of housing, of energy, and of food, and really bear down on the root causes of the cost-of-living crisis”, but it’s not clear what that means. This is pretty thin gruel.
On the wider student finance question, we’re reminded that the Conservatives’ tuition fee system “is broken” and that it “doesn’t work for students, for our universities who are increasingly having to cut back courses as they’re getting squeezed, and we’re not getting a good deal as taxpayers.”
So is change coming? Not fast:
We want to take time to get this right because not deliver more bungled reforms, so from government – should we win the trust of the British people – we will work through the modelling available, with students and with our universities, to make changes to this system because we know it isn’t working. We will do this without putting any more burdens on the taxpayer because we know working people are already struggling.
We’ve gone over the options here before. None look especially palatable.
The SNP
The party of free tuition for Scottish students in Scotland thinks that higher (undergraduate) education should always be based on the ability to learn rather than the ability to pay – and so it will “never” put a price on education (unless you’re a postgrad):
That is why around 120,000 Scottish students in Scotland do not have to pay a single penny for tuition fees – and never will do whilst the SNP is in government.
Unlike the other main parties, the SNP says it will continue to make sure that Scottish students don’t leave their studies “saddled with thousands of pounds in tuition fee debt” and “will never impose tuition fees”. This, apparently, saves around £28,000 per student compared to the rest of the UK and in addition “average student loan debt for Scottish students is the lowest in the UK.”
Who knows where the £28k figure comes from – it neither sounds like four years’ of fees nor the actual difference between how much a Scottish graduate pays over their lifetime in real terms compared to an English graduate. Last time I looked that difference was under 10k.
The party also uses its opportunity to talk about providing young people under 22 years old with a free bus pass, and care-experienced student bursaries. What’s baffling is that it doesn’t take the opportunity to boast about its coming significant increases in student maintenance.
Maybe it’s preparing to wriggle out of its “Scottish Living Wage” anchor for the total value of that package. Or maybe the main parties just don’t care much about this area.
The Liberal Democrats
The Lib Dems open their disappointing contribution to students’ food cupboards by stressing that the Conservative Government “has made student finance more and more regressive”, reminding us about the scrapping of maintenance grants, the lowering of the salary at which graduates start repaying their loans, and the “devaluation of arts courses” at our “internationally renowned” universities.
Davey does spot that for most students, “the cost of living is the most pressing concern”, and so the Liberal Democrats would “reinstate maintenance grants” for disadvantaged students “immediately”, without telling us what “disadvantaged” would count as nor how much they’d be getting.
“We would also establish a review of higher education finance in the next Parliament” to consider any reforms in light of the “latest evidence of the impact of the existing financing system on access, participation and quality”, and make sure there is no more “retrospective raising of rates or selling-off of loans to private companies.” Weak.
Plaid Cymru
The part of Wales mixes in some SNP and Lib Dem generosity to pledge that they’re committed to making “university education free for all” and are committed to introducing “tuition and maintenance loans for all adults over 18 in both further and higher education”.
It seems that even when nobody’s looking at your excel sheet, you decide to not add maintenance per student – only to extend existing entitlements to more people.
“We have also outlined a strong commitment to lifelong learning, including a lifetime learning allowance, offering a grant of £5,000 to every individual over 25 to train or retrain, and are committed to addressing the fall in part-time and mature study.” Ah OK then.
Green Party
The Greens say they would “fully fund” every higher education student, “restoring maintenance grants and scrapping undergraduate tuition fees”. Their long-term plans also include seeking to “cancel the injustice of graduate debt”. The Corbyn position in other words – which was also pretty useless on maintenance levels.
The worst bit is the maths – they say that the manifesto provides for replacing new student loans with direct funding of universities and maintenance grants to new students at a headline revenue cost of £25bn per year. How?
Because the OBR forecasts assume that about one third of loans would not be repaid anyway the net cost is lower with an estimated effect on the public sector net debt by the end of 5 years of £2.5bn.
The OBR is looking at all current student debt. Right now the RAB subsidy for new students is much much less than 33 per cent. Fantasy stuff.
Reform UK
Farage, finally. Reform wants more of our young people to pursue training and apprenticeships – funded by its “Employer Immigration Tax” on the employment of foreign workers that will “raise £20bn in just one parliament”.
OK. Anything on maintenance?
Students should only go to uni if they are studying for worthwhile degrees.
OK. Anything on maintenance?
To ease the financial burden on students that do decide to go to university, Reform UK is committed to scrapping interest payments on student loans – a huge boost for our indebted young people.
They haven’t noticed that the Tories have already done this – and it’s a measure that only really helps rich male graduates in their fifties and sixties. Ahem.
Is that it?
There are a few other bits and bobs in there of interest to/help to students. Labour seems to be promising challenges to unfair rent hikes – although it remains to be seen whether that will be a power that can used between tenancies rather than during them. Nobody mentions student access to childcare in the question on those costs.
Labour wants to “end mass dependence on emergency food parcels” which is a “moral scar on our society”, but seems to have nothing that would deliver that end on campus. If the Greens’ Universal Basic Income ever caught on it would surely have to apply to students. Students with a car might get some CMA enforcement over insurance (while the CMA studiously ignores their rights in education) and students who have WASPI women parents look set for some sort of pay out, maybe.
Honestly? Even if you disagree with “retail offer” politics (god forbid parties should offer you…something) this is all woeful. There are three million people in the UK that are roundly being ignored here.
I know boomer readers will wax on about why it’s important to vote just as people say free speech is important. But why should students have any faith at all in politics when this is the shower on offer? Shame.
