A Conservative former universities minister has sought to force into the open the issue of England’s ongoing fee cap freeze and “flush out” whether the Tory government and Labour are “engaging with this issue before the crisis in funding takes a further turn for the worse”.
Lord Johnson of Marylebone tabled an amendment to the Lifelong Learning (Higher Education Fee Limits) Bill that would allow the £9,250 tuition fee cap to rise in line with inflation, an attempt to shift an impasse on the freeze that, he warned, was “creating a situation in which we are systematically defunding our universities, depriving the engines of our knowledge economy of the fuel they need to offer great teaching and world-class research”.
The government has said the fee cap will be frozen until at least 2024-25, meaning a freeze of at least seven years since it rose, to £9,250 in 2017, and little movement since trebling to £9,000 in 2012 to make up for the slashing of direct public funding.
In his time as minister, Lord Johnson set up a system in which fees could rise in line with inflation subject to universities meeting expectations in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) – a system his amendment seeks to revive by calling for automatic annual inflation uprating to the fee cap for universities delivering “great teaching and student outcomes” as assessed by the TEF.
