Coalition’s tricky questions on Lord Browne’s university funding review
Just how big is the gulf between what Lord John Browne’s review on university funding is leaning towards and what the coalition wants? And how serious would a difference of opinion be?
Second one first, as it’s a bit easier to answer. The Browne review is published on 11 October. The government has to have its agreed way forward on higher education funding ready for the spending review on 20 October.
Now, the government is not honour bound to accept the Browne review, but it would not particularly want to look like it was riding roughshod over their work and, realistically, time would be extremely tight to think up a completely fresh approach.
Vince Cable’s team insists it doesn’t know what is in the draft Browne report but other parts of Whitehall know very well what the Browne review is considering because the review team passes on its thoughts to be run through Treasury modelling predictors to work out costs.
Can Browne come up with something that is agreeable to both parts of the coalition? The final page of the coalition agreement says “if the response of the Government to Lord Browne’s report is one that Liberal Democrats cannot accept, then arrangements will be made to enable Liberal Democrat MPs to abstain in any vote.” But they so don’t want to go there.
With their big campus seat votes, they want something they can back not something they try to long finger and get fingered for anyway.
That was what Vince Cable was searching for when he raised the prospect of a graduate tax before the summer break. He used the phrase “graduate contribution” (which covers a multitude of options) but “graduate tax” was one option he was floating. It would sound more progressive to Lib Dems, might just soften the pill that they were effectively reneging on their romantic attachment to universally free higher education.
Well-paid graduates could end up paying many times over the cost of their degree. But the Browne Review doesn’t like the sound of that.
It is leaning towards higher and truly variable fees that take into account likely future earnings from different degree courses, starting in the autumn term of 2013.
Graduates would be paying more than they pay now, some a lot more. But they’d be paying the agreed selling price of the degree course, not paying for their degree course many times over. Much more “contribution” than “tax.”
That risks sounding and looking a lot like a continuation of the tuition fees path that Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis set HE on years ago, and which the Lib Dems have set their faces against in policy statements and speeches galore.
It might be possible to dress it up as a change of approach, but would it be enough of a change?
A source close to the Browne Review insists they are “very alive to the politics” of all this and that “The Times” presentation of the story today is too stark an “either/or” take on the options.
They feel they can still come up with something that Vince Cable can sell to his people. They have four weeks to work it out.