Keir Starmer is quite right to keep tuition fees

The Scottish experience shows that abolishing fees – paradoxically – fails to benefit the poor, writes John Rentoul

The bottom line is that university education is expensive (Alamy)

Keir Starmer said “university tuition fees are not working well”, but he refused to repeat his promise to abolish them, in answer to a question after his New Year speech on Thursday. In the speech itself, he said: “We won’t be able to spend our way out of their mess. It’s not as simple as that.”

He is right. The promise to abolish tuition fees, which he said he would “stand by” during the 2020 Labour leadership election, is not the simple matter of social justice that it seems.

This was made clearer by the publication on Friday of figures for Scottish universities, showing that the gap between students from affluent and deprived areas gaining places has widened over the past four years. The SNP government in Scotland abolished tuition fees when it came to power 16 years ago, but it has failed to produce the greater equality of opportunity that its supporters hoped.

The bottom line is that university education is expensive, and if the students themselves don’t pay for it out of their earnings after graduation, as students in England and Wales do, the money has to come from somewhere else. That means the Scottish government has raided other parts of the education budget to pay for universities, and it also means that it has imposed a cap on the number of students that can go to university.

This means that some students who want to go to university in Scotland, and who would be able to in the rest of the UK, cannot do so. What is worse, though, is that the Scottish system does not even result in more students from poor areas going to university.

What is striking about the tuition fee system in the rest of the UK is that it has not deterred students from poorer backgrounds from going to university, neither when it was introduced nor when fees were raised from £3,000 a year to £9,000. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the evidence suggests that students see the fees and loan system as a form of graduate tax rather than a normal debt.

Given how expensive it would be to abolish tuition fees, and given that abolition would mostly benefit students who, whatever their background, go on to better-paid jobs on average, Starmer is quite right to put his promise on hold.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator