The wisdom or otherwise of scrapping tuition fees was going to be the flashpoint of this spring's Lib Dem conference – a sizeable chunk of the party thinks that the £2.1bn it would cost to get rid of charges on higher education (reaching £3bn by 2010) could more effectively be spent elsewhere. Abolishing child poverty by 2020 could be achieved with a cool £4bn.
Well, serene calm has enveloped the Lib Dem party (previous causes for excitement: autumn conference last year was a fight about £20bn of spending cuts; the conference before that, Clegg's maiden speech; and the conference before that was Ming Campbell's last hurrah). They've just debated and pushed the policy through.
I asked Clegg about this yesterday and the answer was an emphatic: "We're sticking with it."
First off, he said his team had taken another look at the figures being bandied around and found them to be inaccurate. If you actually factor in money the government pays up front for these students to go to university – which is only paid back once the student is earning an income – then the sums are not in the £2.1-£3bn league but £600m.
Clegg made a pitch for the policy being especially relevant. "What has changed of course are the economics of this. You cannot in my view say to the hundreds of thousands of graduates who are going to graduate this summer – almost certainly finding themselves graduating into joblessness if we don't do something about it – we can't say to them, 'Look, debt has hobbled the British economy, too much debt has holed the economy below the waterline and we're going to saddle you with additional debt.' The answer to debt is not more debt.
"If the good time had lasted, and if this was a process of two years, we might have come up with a different approach."
The government is reviewing tuition fees under pressure from universities keen to charge more than the current £3,000 per student. Universities say this is needed to keep them in the constellation of the best international universities. If Clegg is making an argument based on arithmetic then that arithmetic is soon to be blown by cash-strapped universities – would a Lib Dem government really want to see the ministry for education footing this expanded bill?
Probably. The policy will help the party in the university towns of Hull North, Sheffield Hallam, Oxford West and Abingdon, Cambridge and Bristol West in Lib Dem control. So it is worth its weight in gold.
