Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has rowed back on his previous pledge to abolish university tuition fees. Perhaps it is unsurprising that, sensing the genuine possibility of government, he has stopped promoting promises he will be unable to keep. This isn’t the first of the ten pledges made during Starmer’s campaign to become party leader to be dropped, but he insisted earlier this year that those commitments “haven’t all been abandoned by any stretch of the imagination”.
However, in a recent interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he said that Labour is likely to “move on” from the commitment to abolish tuition fees because “we do find ourselves in a different financial situation”. And he added: “We are looking at options for how we fund these fees. The current system is unfair, it doesn’t really work for students, it doesn’t work for universities.”
The pledge was also included in the past two Labour Party general election manifestos and the change of policy has met with some criticism. The Tories have called Starmer a “flip-flopping” party leader; and the National Union of Students described the move as “truly disappointing”, its spokesperson warning: “The Labour Party needs a clear vision that young people and students will turn up for, and cannot take their votes for granted.” However, as shown in a YouGov poll, some students think that paying for their own degrees is fair, with 50% pro fees and only 30% wanting the public to pay through general taxation.
The question remains, though, of what happens to the money raised by the repayment of university tuition fees. There are calls for the cash to be ploughed into the overall education pot, but with nursery education in crisis, numerous state schools struggling and further education neglected, there is little evidence of that happening. Undergraduate tuition fees are currently capped at £9,250 per year, but there are ongoing university funding issues. And while the Government cuts funding for arts-based courses, considered not “strategic priorities”, many institutions depend on recruiting higher-fee-paying foreign students and expanding the range of subjects on offer.
