Higher Education Fees

I will take an intervention later, if my hon. Friend does not mind. We have eliminated, I think, most of the other alternatives to raising funding for universities. I hope that nobody on the Opposition Benches is seriously arguing that we should drastically reduce the number of students, that we should drastically reduce maintenance or that we should simply withdraw funding from universities. The only practical alternative was to retrieve income for universities from high-earning graduates once they have left. That is the policy that we are pursuing, and today, 50 university vice-chancellors have come forward and endorsed this approach to the strengthening of university funding in the long term.