The former Labour Business Secretary, Peter Mandelson, is set to warn his party about their imminent higher education pledge. Mandelson, whose department received the universities and skills brief during the New Labour years, is intervening ahead of Labour’s expected announcement of a cut in tuition fees.
The Guardian reports that the Labour peer will suggest any reform to tuition fees has to ensure that the current range and flow of funding into universities from all available sources is sustained. He is also expected to voice his concern about making a higher education pledge before the election, believing it would be better to resolve the issue when in government.
In Mandelson’s opinion, the levers of government would allow the party to tackle the extremely complex long-term funding implications of changing tuition fees. It would also provide Labour the opportunity to properly consider the impact if a graduate tax were introduced, a policy that the shadow universities minister Liam Byrne told me is his preferred option.
Mandelson will make his comments about Labour’s upcoming policy in a speech to Universities UK today, as the Labour leadership continues to grapple with its tuition fees announcement, which has long been expected to arrive this month.
The party is a little stuck with its higher education promise. Even as far back as 2011, and repeatedly since then, Miliband and other senior Labourites have said that were they currently in government (I hear Labour politicians were instructed to speak strictly “in the subjunctive” on this subject), they would introduce £6,000 tuition fees, down from the coalition’s controversial £9,000.
Yet the party has not officially announced this policy, and seems to be in limbo. I hear from a shadow cabinet aide that the shadow chancellor Ed Balls is “happy” for Labour to cut tuition fees, but needs the party to find the money to cost such a policy, and so Labour is waiting on coming up with a funding plan. Another obstacle is that although cutting tuition fees is a popular policy, university vice chancellors have been forthright against a tuition fee cut, and there is the argument that the coalition tripling the fees has not actually put pupils off applying to university. A better policy, as Tim has written, would be to help disadvantaged students with maintenance funding, rather than cutting their tuition fees.
On the BBC’s Today programme this morning, the Business Secretary Vince Cable defending the Lib Dems’ agreement to a hike in tuition fees, referred to Labour being stuck on its policy: “As I understand it, the people who are advising Ed Miliband and his team are telling him that this is a very foolish thing to do because it will either open a very large hole in their budget or it will be funded by quite serious cuts in universities, which is the last thing we want.”
It could be that there are other plans in the mix, to mitigate the cost of helping out students financially. One shadow cabinet aide close to the tuition fees wrangling tells me there has been talk among some of a system like New Zealand’s, which has interest-free student loans.
Labour’s tuition fees announcement was supposed to take place in February, which means the party only has a week left to reveal its policy. Apparently, this decision now lies with Miliband. As the party is planning to unveil its “young people’s manifesto” at the end of this month, it may coincide with that.
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