Student Debt and Rip Off Britain: It Falls On Reform UK to Tackle Our Injustices

According to the OECD, England has the most expensive publicly-funded university system in the world. Despite this, the ‘graduate dividend’ for students in England – the additional lifetime earnings they can expect – is shockingly small. 

A degree in the UK leads to extra earnings of £153,000 for men and £140,000 for women – less than the international average of £209,000 and below the likes of France, Germany and Ireland (where tuition is free). While college debt in the US is far higher, graduates can expect an equally massive shift in projected earnings: a typical male graduate in the US will earn £426,000 more over his career, while a woman will earn an extra £308,000.

Whether it is the sheer size of student debt, the thresholds and recent interest rate rises from the government, young people in the UK are getting a bad deal and they deserve so much better. On the other hand we have the two major political parties, Labour and the Conservatives who do nothing for the young generation, in the economy, in taxation, in the rental housing sector, from the level of primary education onwards. Going back four years in the Brexit Party, when we started talking about the needs of young people, how an independent United Kingdom could bring about reform of the education sector, a lot of people were surprised.

Young people need a new political voice
 

Education, the future of our country, and students. There is almost nothing more important. We have wokeness and discrimination and the death of free speech in our universities and the silence from the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition is shocking. It’s indicative of the crisis of leadership that we have right now.

So while Rishi Sunak meddles with technical changes to A Levels that would only affect five year-olds and under, more meddling that the schools sector doesn’t want and doesn’t need, on the other hand we have the socialist envy from Sir Keir Starmer, putting VAT on private schools.
 

These new measures on private schools will affect those families with the aspiration to want to choose where they send their children. The government just wants to meddle at a time when school heads want stability and they just want the government to offer reliable funding so that they can plan over their three-year planning cycle. This meddling is one of the real crises in education. That is being felt by young people at the moment, the worry and burden of student loans and what's going on with student debt and our universities.

Reform UK leader Richard Tice talked about this a lot in his address to the 2023 Reform UK Conference.

How government loads the student finance system
 

Four years ago, the total quantity at the national level of all the student loans issued was an estimated £120 billion. It’s almost impossible to know what that number is really. 
 

The face value now of all that student debt is an estimated £205 billion. In twelve years time it'll be £400 billion. Every year, it's going up by well over £20 billion. These numbers are so large that they’re almost impossible to understand. But here's the scam. 
 

The base value of the stock of student loans is £200 billion. The Conservatives have written off £100 in the national accounts as ‘non recoverable’. So in the accounts it's down at £100 billion. But guess what they're charging interest on, guess what they’re loading onto our young people? The government is charging interest now at 7.3%. On the whole £205 billion.
 

It's an absolute scandal and any student, any family should rightly be angry about this. Our students have a mountain of debt and a mountain of worry before they’ve even started out in life. And with that rate of interest, we've got the highest student debt per head of any major nation in the world. 
 

Most students are leaving now with £40,000 worth of debt. And no one talks about okay, how much of that is being repaid? How do the young people get on top of this, even if you are managing to earn £60,000 a year, which is double the average national salary. 
 

The answer is: you will not be able to pay. The interest on your loan, let alone pay back any of the capital. How demoralizing? How demotivating? How de-energizing is that to our young people? It's not surprising that they’re getting fed up with politics and politicians.
 

How can they try and save for a deposit when they're being charged so much interest. Here’s an example that Richard Tice talked about in the conference. Let’s take a typical student who left uni three years ago with a total £40,000 debt. Let’s say they earn £60,000, they’re a high flyer and they have a good job. He's doing well. He's flying along. He's now earning almost double he average salary in the country. His student loan statement today will show a balance of £47,000, three years later. It’s almost impossible for young people to service that level of debt.
 

You see what's happening. You see the impact that has on our young people. It’s utterly devastating.

Thanks to Tony Blair, the original architect of the student finance system, somewhere between 40% and 50% now of young people are still going to university thinking that it's going to mean greater opportunity. In fact its piling them up with a load of debt that it's almost impossible to get on top of. The sheer irony is that Euan Blair, Tony Blair’s son has made tens and tens and tens of millions of pounds of profit with his apprenticeship company, telling people to do exactly the opposite. 
 

This is a really serious situation for our young people. It's also incredibly serious for us taxpayers. The truth is we're all being ripped off!!! Students, taxpayers, the lot of us.
 

Our country are being ripped off and demoralized in far too many aspects of life. A lot of the degree courses being offered are next to useless, and there was a new one showcased on TV recently, an undergraduate degree in ‘Magic’.
 

So this is what's going on. Our young people are being completely and utterly ripped off. 

Student visas: the taxpayer foots the bill
 

It's an outrage and it’s the same situation that we, as the Brexit Party and Reform UK, have been fighting against for more than four years. Our specific proposals have been outlined by Richard Tice. The first thing we've got to do is you've got to scrap the interest on these loans. 
 

The second thing is that we can streamline a lot of these degrees and create better deals for students. A lot of degrees could be done in two years. Many students are getting eight or nine hours lectures a week if they're lucky, over 23 weeks a year. A lot of it now is remote learning. Why can't they have the choice to say, let me finish in two years and save myself £12,000 or £15,000.
 

That should be their right. It’s absolutely essential and an example of our reformist approach. The third thing we've got to do, is just say no, we're not going to have a lot of these useless degrees. There's got to be a freeze and a reduction in the university student numbers. The only people benefiting are the lefty academics, and the universities themselves. 
 

Everybody else is being conned and it's an outrage. How do you pay not just for the interest, for the extra capital repayment when you’re a 21 year old or 22 year old? Reducing the university numbers by 15% to 20% is what we've got to do. That will help pay for slimming down of the university sector and having two year degrees as an option. 
 

We have to do this because otherwise, our young people will feel increasingly ripped off and left without a future. Not a word from Starmer, not a word from Sunak. They just don't seem to care.

Now, the other crisis in universities is what's going on with student visas. For international students the numbers are absolutely extraordinary and we need to have a national conversation about this. Four or five years ago there were about 200,000 International Student Visas granted. That number now is 650,000, including the number of associated family members and other dependents. It involves a sevenfold increase in the number of student dependents. And this is a backdoor route to be able to come and live in the UK forever.
 

And surprise, surprise. Everybody's worked it out from all over the world. Who knows what the number will be next year? The universities love the status quo as it means more income. They charge them even more. But the extra pressure on our services, on our housing, on our NHS, it’s not surprising that demand is through the roof. We've got half a million more students coming to live here. International students can stay for two years, and then they can convert it into a five year skilled worker visa. We know what skills and academic skills that means, and then the international students with their dependents can stay forever.
 

Surprise, surprise more student dependents are coming. How much more can our public services and our housing sector take? 24 months? 36 months? We the taxpayer are being ripped off. And our young people are being ripped off. 
 

It's a huge crisis. No one else is talking about it. It's got to be spoken about as a national issue and once again, it’s one of those issues where Reform UK is the only political force to tell it as it is. Protecting our children in the schools sector is also important, dealing with the woke psychology around gender, transgender and critical race theory, trying to rewrite British history and British values. These are some other areas where only Reform UK is willing to speak up. But that’s a promise from Reform UK. We’re going to deal with these issues and create a better future, our children's and young people's future.