| Practice area: | Education and Labour Markets |
|---|---|
| Client: | Nuffield Foundation |
| Published: | 25 June, 2024 |
| Keywords: | economics of education higher education 2024 Public Policy |
Funded by the Nuffield Foundation, London Economics are undertaking a range of in-depth analyses in relation to higher education fees and funding arrangements across the four Home Nations of the UK, ahead of the next General Election. Following our earlier in-depth analyses of higher education fees and funding across the UK (available here), this report provides an assessment of manifesto pledges on higher education funding ahead of the General Election.
With a wide range of pressing policy and economic issues to address, few of the major parties have made specific pledges in relation to higher education funding. Even where such pledges have been made, unsurprisingly, the manifestos include little detail on the specifics of any proposed policy. In several cases, we therefore had to interpret the parties’ proposals to allow us to model their impact. The analysis here focuses exclusively on England, since neither the Scottish National Party nor Plaid Cymru made manifesto commitments on HE funding that were sufficiently specific and detailed to allow us to assess their impacts.
In summary:
- Given its recent reforms in response to the Augar Review, the Conservative Party’s manifesto hints that the party intends to continue the current funding arrangements applicable to English domiciled undergraduate students.
- The Labour Party’s manifesto includes little in relation to HE fees and funding. While there might be significant changes to the system to introduce a greater degree of progressivity under an incoming Labour government, the lack of detail in the party’s manifesto means that we are unable to specifically model Labour’s manifesto commitments on HE fees and funding.
- The Liberal Democrats’ manifesto includes a headline commitment to reinstate maintenance grants for the most disadvantaged students. Here, we have interpreted this as the re-introduction of the ‘old’ system of maintenance grants for full-time students (i.e. the pre-2016-17 maintenance grants) to partially replace current maintenance loans.
- The Green Party has pledged the full removal of tuition fees (i.e. a free fees system), and also plans to restore maintenance grants – but the proposals go further than the Liberal Democrats’ pledges by stating a long-term plan to cancel all existing student debt – which would potentially imply the full replacement of maintenance loans with grants. Here, for the core analysis, we have modelled the same ‘old’ maintenance grants to partially replace loans as for the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto (but we also provide indicative estimates of what a full replacement of maintenance loans with grants would cost).
- Reform UK’s manifesto instead focuses exclusively on student loan repayment terms, by pledging the removal of (nominal) loan interest rates and the extension of the loan repayment period from 40 to 45 years.