A former Conservative higher education minister has criticised the UK government’s present freeze on tuition fees as “Corbyn-lite”.
Speaking in a debate on the “impasse” surrounding the country’s higher education funding system, Lord Johnson of Marylebone argued that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the current model. However, the decision to keep fees at £9,250 a year – the same level as in 2017-18, and just £250 more than in 2012-13 – would also require additional state subsidy on a scale not dissimilar to that proposed by Jeremy Corbyn when he was leader of the Labour Party, he argued.
“The system that Tony Blair introduced 25 years ago, which is a time-limited and income-contingent graduate contribution to the repayment of heavily subsidised tuition and maintenance loans is the least bad of all available options,” he said in the debate hosted by Policy Exchange.
The former minister for universities and science under three different prime ministers said there are “two easily fixable flaws” in the UK system – namely that tuition fees have been eroded by inflation, and that there is no link between fees and the quality of education on offer.
