Phil Willis on tuition fees

If you had suggested a few years ago that the question of British university finance would not only be at the top of the political agenda but also a matter of a nail biting vote for Tony Blair next week, people would have thought you were mad.

But so it is - and we offered each of the major parties a chance to outline their policies.

The Liberal Democrats plan to abolish ALL tuition fees, to reintroduce maintenance grants of up to £2000 and pledge more money for universities.

And all this will be paid for from a new 50% income tax band for those earning over £100,000.

Gavin Esler interviewed the Liberal Democrat Education spokesman Phil Willis.

GAVIN ESLER:
If you are going to raise income tax, aren't there plenty of better things to spend money on than students who want more Government handouts?

PHIL WILLIS MP
(Liberal Democrat, Education spokesman):
We have to accept two things. For 20 years, we have had a university system that has systematically had its budgets cut, and has moved from a world-class higher-education service to in some cases a third-world higher education service.

ESLER:
Everybody broadly agrees with that?

WILLIS:
We do. We desperately need to put resources into that. All political parties have to make judgments in terms of how to deploy resources. We believe that, in terms of the economy, and certainly in terms of individual students and individual people, that an investment in higher education is an investment in our economy, and is an investment in our people.

ESLER:
Sure, but if you are going to pay for it by raising income tax, admittedly on the top earners, you could spend it on, as the Government would perhaps, on education for the under fives, which Charles Clarke has said are much more important than university students?

WILLIS:
We have said in terms of the under fives that we wouldn't do the baby bond issue, which the Chancellor is doing. We would use £350 million to put into early-years education. But we are not raising tax on everybody. It's not a general tax increase. This is a tax on 1% of the people, 82% of whom are graduates and who will repay something for the degrees that they have, which were in fact free at the point of delivery.

ESLER:
But it won't raise enough, will it?

WILLIS:
Of course it will.

ESLER:
It will? There is a £10 billion shortfall. Do we agree on that figure?

WILLIS:
I think we have to be honest about what the 10 billion gap is. What Universities UK is saying is that over a period from 2005 to 2010, they need in the order of £10 billion. Roughly 45% of that is capital and the rest is revenue, and that we are prepared to put in exactly what the Government is saying, roughly £1.1 billion per year and that closes that gap significantly. Of course you have the issues of capital to deal with, but that is something that the whole of the public sector has to do, in terms of let's say state management.

ESLER:
OK, but doesn't your 50% rate for these top earners over £100,000 pay for scrapping tuition fees, more money for higher education, £1 billion for personal care for the elderly, £1.7 billion council tax, plus cutting taxes for the lowest paid, abolishing dental charges and probably other things as well. Does that add up?

WILLIS:
Newsnight shouldn't take its information from Mr Blair. We have made it quite clear, and Charles Kennedy has, in both a letter to the Prime Minister and on the floor of the House, as I have, that there are three calls on the higher rate of tax. One is roughly two billion to go into our universities and the remainder to be spent on free personal care to the elderly and the move to cushion moving from council tax into other tax. This has to come out of reorganising money or making savings elsewhere.

ESLER:
Charles Kennedy also said in a speech last year, unlike the Government, "we would not set a target of getting 50% of the population of student age into higher education." The message is you are discouraging some of our brightest people from going to university?

WILLIS:
Not at all. The Robbins principle says if people have the necessary qualifications to go into higher education, they should do. The key question is what sort of higher education do we want for the nation and is the product we are giving at the moment right? What we find scandalous as a party is that, if you do two A-levels at school, 95% of those young people are likely to go into higher education. If you go a vocational route and do, for instance, modern apprenticeship, 40% of those are likely to go into higher education. We want to see the balance shift so that we deal with the skills of the nation as well as the academic needs of the nation.

ESLER:
You wrote a policy paper last year which says, "Over time, we would expect students opting, for example, to postpone study, opting out after two years at the foundation level, opting for part-time study." It sounds like flexibility, but also you are trying to do it on the cheap. "Don't stay at university for three years because we can't afford it."

WILLIS:
We have to accept, if we are in a mass education market, we can't deliver it on a 1960s post-Robbins model, of everyone going off to university for three years. Virtually half the students in our universities at the moment are studying part-time. The idea, certainly that you see in the United States and in most areas of the Continent, where you are seeing people work for a while, study for a while, to earn and learn, to work part-time and to study part-time. They are all sorts of models which we ought to be using in terms of delivering the higher education product.

ESLER:
Do you want people to live at home as well? Charles Kennedy said something of that nature last year, which is "live with mum, vote Liberal Democrats," doesn't sound a great draw for students, does it?

WILLIS:
You have to be realistic. In terms of the Government's expansion of higher education, which we broadly support, they are looking at about 250,000 extra students by 2010. Most of those will be doing two-year foundation degrees. We accept that that is a realistic model. The idea that students are going to go away to do a two-year foundation degree is not realistic. The reality is, in a survey I have just done of five major cities in Britain, that already 46% of young people actually live at home and study locally. It is a pattern that already exists.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.