Higher Education Fees

When I became Secretary of State, I invited Lord Browne to make two adaptations to the terms of reference that he had undertaken under the previous Government. The first thing that I asked him to do was to see how we could make the existing system of graduate payments more progressive and more related to future graduates' ability to pay. He undertook to do that, and we have done further work to develop the progressivity of the system. As a result, the Institute for Fiscal Studies was able to conclude that the package that we have produced is more progressive than the existing system and more progressive than the Browne report. Concretely, what that means is that just a little under 25% of all future graduates will pay less than they do under the current system that we inherited from the Labour Government.