The Conservative Party has “turned” its back on students and must scrap university tuition fees to regain young votes at the next general election, a former Tory education secretary has said.
Justine Greening, who served as education secretary from 2016-18 under Theresa May’s premiership, said the current university funding model “has become unsustainable” and is “anti-levelling up”.
“My party, I’m sorry to say, has seemingly turned its face on students and [the] aspirations of students,” she said at a debate hosted by the Policy Exchange think-tank on Wednesday.
“At the moment there is a direct correlation between the drop-off rates of people voting Conservative and the proportion of people in those generations who have been to university.”
The Conservative vote share has typically remained low in so-called “student seats” across the UK, where more than 10 per cent of the voting-age population are students.
However, it fell by almost 1 per cent at the last general election in 2019, with the Conservative Party boasting just 26 per cent of votes in the 77 student seats across the country, compared to 50 per cent who voted Labour.
