Yorkshire and Lincolnshire: Is the Price right?

Len Tingle Political Editor, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire

Thousands of students pour off trains at Huddersfield as they head for the first lectures of a new academic year at the West Yorkshire town's University.

Most will not even notice they are passing a bronze statue of a stocky figure in a raincoat, holding a pipe in his hand.

But those students are able to study in the town because Harold Wilson, the West Yorkshire town's most famous political son, started off the rapid expansion of higher education which has continued under successive Governments and is still going on today.

Harold Wilson, Huddersfield's most famous political son

Wilson's Labour Government of the Sixties aimed to crack open the existing university system which educated a tiny fraction of school leavers, usually from better off families.

Thousands of new places to study for a degree were created in alternative institutions.

Success story

Huddersfield, which started off as a Polytechnic, is now a thriving University with over 18,000 undergraduates who stream into its modern campus though the atrium of the Harold Wilson building.

Huddersfield is a thriving University with over 18,000 students

Huddersfield has tailored its courses to the needs of industrial West Yorkshire.

Many of its degrees are vocational and the majority of its students are local and live at home.

Two thirds of them come from families whose incomes are so low that they do not have to pay the annual £1,100 contribution to tuition fees which the Government imposed two years ago.

Huddersfield University put in a highly vulnerable position

This, according to the Vice Chancellor, Professor John Tarrant, puts it in a highly vulnerable position if the Government insists that from 2005, a big chunk of his funding should come from charging students thousands of pounds more in annual top-up fees.

A Yorkshire MP has just been handed the task of persuading Vice Chancellors that top-up fees are the only practical way of raising the billions of pounds required to expand higher education.

Allow universities to charge up to £3,000 a year

Alan Johnson, the genial Labour MP who represents one of the Hull Constituencies, recently became the new Minister for Higher Education and he told the Politics Show that there really is no alternative.

His plan would allow universities to charge up to £3,000 a year.

Repaid post graduation

The money would not have to be paid back until the student had graduated and was earning at least £15,000 a year.

Alan Johnson says it is a fair and practical way to help fund his ambition to see half of all school leavers studying for a degree by the end of the decade.

Len Tingle interviews Alan Johnson, MP for the Politics Show

But Huddersfield says it is a potentially dangerous strategy which penalises newer universities which have done such a good job in attracting more students from poorer backgrounds.

The prospect of a huge debt could deter many of their potential students from taking up a university place!

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