The personal finance expert Martin Lewis upbraided the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, for freezing the threshold at which millions of graduates repay their loans, saying that this was treating student debts like tax. He was right, and Ms Reeves’s defence last weekend made his case for him. She argued that her decision would help to fund a reduction in patient waiting lists. But money used to repay student loans cannot simultaneously fund public services. In economic terms, such charges are taxes in all but name.
Mr Lewis’s reasoning was nuanced. He pointed out that freezing the repayment threshold is either a retrospective rewriting of the terms of a private contract or a targeted tax rise on a cohort of young people. Neither, he said, fits Ms Reeves’s claim that the policy is “fair and reasonable”. There are five student “loan” plans in operation covering most postgraduate courses, Scotland and three largely English student cohorts: entrants pre-2012, those between 2012 and 2023, and those post-2023.
