Speeches by Glen.

“It is not a conventional loan, is it?”

“That clearly has not been effective as a communications mechanism.”

“Five years or something.”

“I will be grateful if you could, because that is a significant number, which was not declared. In terms of transparency, that does not do the Government or the Treasury any credit.”

“It sounds like the Department, and probably the Treasury as well, can do that calculation, but for presentational reasons it is undesirable to publish it.”

“Baroness Smith, I want to ask you about some of the evidence we have received, particularly from the Student Loans Company, about the level of understanding that students have about the loans they are taking out. It appears that the vast majority, or a lot of them, did not know about those loans. What do you think abou…”

“I wasn’t trying to misrepresent it; I was trying to get to the heart of it. It seems that you can do the calculation for the top three deciles of earning. You have produced a table that tells us that those in the top three lifetime earnings groups will pay off their loan in full, which implies that you could proceed an…”

“Because the point you have very clearly made is that the distribution of when over a working life you earn that money in that total materially changes the amount that you pay back. You would therefore have misleading headlines; that is what you are saying.”

“You mentioned the write-off and the income contingency thing in your earlier answer. Your argument is that it is a different sort of product, and therefore the Government can vary those terms freely.”

“Do you think, therefore, it would be better to rebrand the loans as a university education contribution, because it is not really a loan in the conventional sense? Would that not do justice to the essential co-payment that exists between the state and the individual?”

“But nearly 40% do not.”

“Don’t you think, though, that students have seen the history of different schemes over time and the changes in the thresholds, rates and so on, so a point will come when their level of confidence in what they sign up to will diminish? Therefore, people will not have confidence, which is not a good start to a young adul…”

“Thank you very much. Chief Secretary, congratulations on your latest promotion. From your previous role as Economic Secretary, you will be very familiar with the terms that exist in financial services for loans and so on, and yet we seem to have an anomaly. The Treasury has for years, under all Governments, had PFI dea…”

“The point I want to get to is that I totally respect your saying there was a different volume of people going to university than there is now. But we also have the evidence that 39%—I think—of people never pay off their student debt. What do you think about the narrative implicit in what you say that more graduates in …”

“I did acknowledge that. I am just saying there has been a massive shift in the volume of people, and I think people would expect us to ask about your view of the validity of that.”

“Thank you for that. In some countries, such as France, vastly higher numbers of people go to university near to their home, which removes some of the significant burdens of maintenance costs and so on. We heard evidence from the previous panel that the UK system has significant wraparound costs, in terms of what is off…”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Baroness Smith, you mentioned in your earlier remarks the difference between when you were a graduate and when I was a graduate roughly a decade later.”

“Drops out.”

“I accept that, but there is uncertainty and apparent evidence that, despite the stipulation that you have to tick that box, people did not grasp that any future Government could materially change the terms and conditions of the loan. Would it not be wise to instruct the Student Loans Company to make that a very explici…”