Tories to support abolition of tuition fees
The Conservative party leadership will today set out its stall for shepherding disenfranchised and disillusioned floating voters into the Tory fold.
Iain Duncan Smith will proffer the abolition of university tuition fees as a key policy pledge on which to contest the next general election.
At a keynote speech in London, entitled ‘A fair deal for everyone,’ Mr. Duncan Smith will delineate Tory plans to overhaul higher education in England, which will include the axing of tuition fees, dubbed Labour’s ‘tax on learning’.
Tuition fees have already been abolished in Scotland.
The Tories will pledge to end the maximum 1,100 pounds a year pounds tuition fee paid by students from wealthier families, and reverse the decision to allow universities charge up to 3,000 pounds a year from 2006.
Damian Green, shadow education secretary, forecasts that an end to tuition fees would cost the taxpayer 700 million a year, but would save students and their families up to 3,000 pounds a year.
The Conservatives have said the new admissions regulator, the Office for Fair Access (Offa), would be jettisoned if they returned to power, as would the Government’s 50% target for university entrance.
Adopting a freeze on student numbers in higher education would save 485 million pounds, the Tories say. 200 million pounds would be saved by scrapping Offa.
Mr. Green believes the tuition fee experiment has ‘failed’.
Mr. Green said: ‘Labour’s tuition fee experiment has failed. It has let down hard-working families who want their children to get on, left young people with huge debts when they start work and tied universities up in red tape.
‘We need a fair deal for students and universities. I want every student to be able to aspire to the top universities, every university to offer places purely on merit, and every student to be studying something worthwhile.
‘Under the Conservatives, the university sector will be smaller, better focused, and open to all who deserve to be there.’
Higher education minister Margaret Hodge, for her part, said the abolition of tuition fees would mean that 100,000 students would be deterred from entering university and 6500 academic jobs would have to go.
