The long-term cost of high student debt is not just for graduates

If graduates are lucky enough to earn more in the years ahead, they will also be dragged into the higher tax bands sooner than would otherwise have been the case, after Reeves’s income tax threshold freeze. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA

“It is not right that people who don’t go to university are having to bear all the cost for others to do so,” Rachel Reeves remarked this week, amid the increasingly angry row about student loans.

But if something is “not right” here, it’s the complex and confusing loan system, and the debt burden borne by some recent graduates of English and Welsh universities.