Tuition fees is the exploding bomb of British politics. It can go off in the hands of an unsuspecting leader and even lead, as in the case of poor Nick Clegg of the Lib Dems, to being forced to flee to Facebook. When he was running to be leader of his party, Sir Keir Starmer issued a pledge, under the heading of social justice, to “support the abolition of tuition fees”. It is obvious that this is a pledge that will have to be broken. The only question is how.
There is a cast-iron economic reason why Labour will eventually junk the policy. When resources are tight, it is very expensive. The precise cost varies depending on what the state pledges to pay for but there is unlikely to be much change out of £10 billion. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, has been incurring the irritation of colleagues with her refusal to countenance spending, as indeed she should, and Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, would be given short shrift if she applied for that great a dispensation.
But Ms Phillipson ought not to ask because there are many better things that she could do with the money. Paying tuition fees through the Exchequer is a vast subsidy to the middle class. Though the student body is less bourgeois than it once was, the majority of students come from relatively prosperous homes.
They are also embarking on a university course that is likely to ensure their earnings greatly exceed those of non-graduates.
It is possible to make the case, as expensive as it is, that higher education should be considered a right of citizenship but it is impossible to make a progressive case for it. The Left of the Labour Party has made the tuition fees policy a test of ideological purity but it is hard to see why. You would not have thought that the first priority of a Labour government, or an urgent issue for the nation, would be a huge handout to the parents of middle-class children.
Yet Labour has had a fixation with ending tuition fees ever since they were brought in by the Blair government. I remember, when Alan Johnson was taking the tuition fees legislation through Parliament, I was deployed to persuade Labour MPs to vote for the bill. I suggested that we should establish a tax in which repayments are deducted from the payroll, related progressively to earnings. The policy would, I argued, be even better than tax because, once the deficit had been cleared, the liability ceased. We could call the policy a capped graduate tax, I argued, and the Labour MPs loved it.
I then explained to them that I had in fact described the policy that was going through Parliament; I had simply renamed it. Yet as soon as they realised that we were discussing tuition fees they once again disliked it, even though we were discussing precisely the same policy.
To be fair to those Labour MPs, they were anxious that the introduction of fees would deter working-class children from applying for university. They were scared that the incurred debt would lead to a rapid decline in applications. In the event, that has not happened. The number of working-class students in university are still too low but that is because too few do A-levels.
The problem starts earlier. The best way to predict outcomes at 18 is to look at outcomes at 16. Indeed, for many pupils the problem starts way back and this is a clue to a viable new policy.
The British state spends too much money too late, in the attempt to remedy problems that have set in, and far too little money early in the life cycle. Phillipson’s signature policy so far has been an expansion of childcare. You can tell this is popular because the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, tried to neutralise it in his Budget by expanding free provision. Adding further theoretical entitlements will do nothing, though, in a system in which there are not enough providers.
A larger commitment, to fund properly qualified nursery staff and expand provision, would be expensive but it would be a far more just use of the money than wasting it on tuition fees. The best estimate of the impact is that a pound spent early in a child’s life cycle will save £7 later in life.
This is exactly the commitment to the long-term which Keir Starmer makes so much of. If he were to link the two questions directly, and say the money works better earlier, it might make it easier to explain why paying tuition fees through taxation is a pledge that ought to be dropped.
