Clause 23 - Condition that may be required to be imposed by English funding bodies
Higher Education Bill
3:15 am
Mr Tim Collins (Westmorland and Lonsdale, Conservative)
I am happy to confirm to the hon. Member for Newbury that, should he choose to press the amendments in this group to a vote, he will have the support of the official Opposition. There are two reasons for that. First, although the hon. Gentleman
was perfectly understandably at pains to explain that the thinking behind the amendments lay with his party's policy on higher income tax for people at a certain level, and so forth, none of that is set out in the amendment, which simply provides another mechanism for getting rid of top-up fees.
The clear Conservative view is that there should not be top-up fees. We are committed to opposing them and reversing their imposition. We shall in due course set out an alternative mechanism to the one advocated by the hon. Gentleman for providing the additional funding for higher education that I think is accepted as necessary on a cross-party basis. However, we are certainly happy to support the principle of any amendments that would strike out top-up fees. Of course, it is very much our view that the best way to defeat them would be to defeat the Bill. That continues to be our objective.