Clause 23 - Condition that may be required to be imposed by English funding bodies
Higher Education Bill
3:30 pm
Mr Tim Collins (Westmorland and Lonsdale, Conservative)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for a rather more gracious intervention than some of his comments earlier today. The point that he makes is important. It is true that the Government will seek to explain that, from their point of view, the financial impact of top-up fees will be ameliorated at least for some categories of our fellow citizens—and, I suspect, for a large proportion of those who live in the hon. Gentleman's constituency—by the attractiveness of the grant arrangements, to the extent that young people are fully familiar with the implications of the grant system, and to the extent also that they believe those grant arrangements will be in place and will be of benefit to them. However, the hon. Gentleman will acknowledge on reflection that there are a number of problems.
First, many people who are by no means wealthy will not be able to gain the support of a grant, and that is likely to be a negative effect. Secondly, although the Government are being more generous than we have seen for a number of years—I do not criticise them for it, because it would be difficult to justify such a use of public resources—they are not being so generous that it will be an open-and-shut, easy-peasy decision; people will obviously not be enormously better off going to university than otherwise, and not all the problems will have been solved. If the hon. Member for Cambridge were here, she would say that the sum total of bursaries and grants at Cambridge and one or two other universities is significant; indeed, in one or two cases it may be as high as £10,000 a year. However, the hon. Gentleman must admit that that is not exactly typical. That is not likely to apply to the majority of students.