What Starmer’s U-turn on tuition fees could mean for Labour

Will voters be put off by another abandoned pledge, asks Sean O’Grady?

3 May 2023 (Dave Brown)

Sir Keir Starmer has said he will drop his party’s pledge to scrap the present £9,250 annual university tuition fees in England if Labour win the next election. The policy applies primarily to England and students from England. In Scotland, undergraduate university education is free for Scots residents, fees are lower in Northern Ireland for “home” students,  and the system is slightly different in Wales.

What was the pledge?

When Starmer was running for Labour leader in 2020 he offered ten promises “based on the moral case for socialism” including: “Support the abolition of tuition fees and invest in lifelong learning.” The new leader, who’d served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, wasn’t ready for any radical U-turns on an established Labour policy popular with the membership.

In the 2019 Labour manifesto, the Corbyn-led party committed itself to “end the free market experiment in higher education” and to “create a National Education Service to provide support and opportunity throughout life from Sure Start centres to top-quality early years education” as well as “well-funded schools with lower class sizes” to “free university tuition with no fees; and free lifelong learning, giving you the chance to reskill throughout your life.” Labour said that the current system leaves the poorest students with debts of £57,000.  It had also proposed to restore maintenance grants, at an unspecified level. Labour argued in 2019 that tuition fees had trebled under the Conservatives. A similar pledge had been made in 2017, Corbyn’s first general election as Labor leader. In 2015, Ed Miliband only promised to cut fees to £6,000.

Rarely mentioned by Labour politicians is the fact that it was the Labour government led by Tony Blair that introduced such fees in 1998, at a rate of £1,000 (£1,800 at today’s prices).

What is the new policy?

TBC. Starmer says there are “other ways of approaching this" and remains critical of the current “unfair” setup that “doesn’t work for students, and doesn’t work for universities" – but there’s no detail yet on what might happen under a Labour government. Starmer merely says he wants to explore “alternative options for funding.” This may conceivably not even begin until a change of government.

Why is Starmer doing this?

According to Starmer, England can no longer afford it: “We are likely to move on from that [2019] commitment, because we do find ourselves in a different financial situation,” he said. He points to the radically different economic backdrop compared to 2019. Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves are keen to delete any remnants of the Corbyn programme that could be exploited by Conservatives to suggest Labour cannot be trusted to manage public finances. In broad political terms it’s about moving Labour closer to the centre ground of politics, and making the party more electable.

And why is he doing it now?

Starmer first indicated a shift in a BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg in January when he declined to rule out changing direction. Now, a year or so before a general election, Starmer is plainly preparing for government and wants to "roll the pitch" in good time, and put any internal party revolts behind him long before polling day.

A cynic might argue the initiative will also distract some attention from the current controversy about him hiring civil servant Sue Gray as his chief of staff.

How many promises has he ditched since becoming leader?

Of the ten pledges made during his party leadership campaign, Starmer has abandoned a plan to take into “common ownership” energy and water companies, hike up income tax for the top five per cent of earners and "defend free movement as we leave the EU". To the disappointment of many in his party Starmer has sought to neutralise the Brexit issue by saying he will not rejoin the EU or its single market or customs union.

All of this has annoyed internal critics on the left, leading to charges of betrayal. Stamer’s opponents on both sides of the party accuse him of being unprincipled and untrustworthy, such is his record of discarding past commitments. His successive changes of mind don’t seem to have had much impact on his popularity, which has never been that high anyway.

Is this change a vote winner?

Tuition fees are bitterly resented by many students and their parents. When the Liberal Democrats reneged on their own promise on tuition fees when joining the Coalition government in 2010, it was followed by student protests and the near-extinction of the party at the 2015 election, a loss from which they have only just begun to recover.

But times change, and fees have become more of an irksome fact of life. The downside of Corbyn’s fee abolition policy was that it created a sense that Labour’s ‘something for nothing’ approach was too good to be true, undermining its credibility as a potential government. No matter how many goodies are presented to the electorate, a party that can’t be trusted on the economy won’t win an election.

Is this good or bad news for higher education?

Good, but only because university finances have become increasingly precarious and reliant on uncapped fee income from foreign students –  a ready source of income that may not last forever. Universities face similar cost pressure to any other public service, while the sector has expanded so rapidly it risks over-capacity and being unable to find ambitious building and student expansion programmes.