Willetts: Tories risking ‘red wall’ if they cut university places

Deterring people from going to university will do nothing to “level up” parts of England as it will just harm the very areas the Westminster government is pledging to help, a former Tory universities minister has argued.

Lord Willetts, who was one of the chief architects of the current system of fees and loans, says it is difficult to understand why “people from the poorest areas should settle for [higher education] participation below 30 per cent whilst it is over 60 per cent for the most affluent”.

In a paper for the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) that puts the case for continued university expansion ahead of the upcoming government spending review, he points out that areas with low university participation are more likely to be the traditionally Labour “red wall” constituencies that helped the Conservatives win the last election.

At the same time, what Lord Willetts ironically calls the “notorious trouble spots” where more than 60 per cent of school-leavers go to university were affluent areas in cities and commuter belts, including constituencies that often voted Tory. 

“If we are to cut numbers going to university, this is the front line where the battle must be fought – but it is not going to happen there. If it happens at all, it will affect marginal students in low participation areas, the opposite of levelling up. The battle would be on the wrong side of the red wall,” he writes.

In his paper, published on 30 September, Lord Willetts goes on to argue that an “overall growth in numbers is the only feasible means of levelling up” and he also criticises thinking on the right that university participation should be deterred because graduates may be more likely to become left-wing.

“It is hard to think of a worse political message than to try to limit [people’s] opportunity of going to university because of a fear that means they will not vote Tory,” says Lord Willetts, who also argued that age was the real political dividing line, not education.

The paper comes ahead of the government’s spending review in a few weeks’ time, which Lord Willetts calls a “moment of reckoning” for higher education funding with decisions being taken “against a political and media backdrop more hostile to universities than for a long time”.

Some of the policy changes that have been under consideration include minimum entry requirements for access to student loans, changes to the terms of graduate repayments or even cuts to tuition fees for courses deemed to be of lower value.

Echoing similar suggestions put forward in another Hepi paper this year, Lord Willetts says that if saving money was the main aim, then lowering the level at which graduates start repaying their debt to £21,000 could save £3 billion a year.

The peer told Times Higher Education that the public cost of the student loan system – known as the resource accounting and budgeting (RAB charge) – did need to be brought down, especially after changes to how it was reflected in Treasury accounts, and lowering the repayment threshold was the best way to achieve this.

“The RAB charge is far too high and now if you count it as public spending, it seems to me there is a very sensible way forward of bringing the RAB charge down to the kind of levels that I always wanted it to be at,” he said.

simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com