Afternoon summary
I’m going to close this live blog down now. Thanks for reading and for all of your comments.
Theresa May has set out the government’s review of post-18 education in a speech in Derby on Monday afternoon. The prime minister said it would focus on ensuring everyone could access higher education, the funding system, incentivising choice and competition and how to deliver the skills the country needs.
She told ITV’s This Morning programme she felt secure in her job and did not worry about being deposed. “I’m doing a job and I’m going to jolly well get on and do it,” she told Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield before her Derby speech.
Downing Street dismissed calls for an early Commons vote on plans to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600. (See 2.15pm).
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Theresa May says we should be concerned when Vice-Chancellors sit on remuneration bodies that determine their pay
— Steven Swinford (@Steven_Swinford) February 19, 2018
A bit of a change of pace to end the question and answer session:
May asked about Corbyn and Czech claims 'it's for individual MP s to be accountable - where there are allegations of this sort they shoudl be prepared to be open and transparent'
— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) February 19, 2018
And, with that, the prime minister exits stage left to polite applause.
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Having suggested there should be a greater focus on technical education, May refuses to give a target for how many people should be going to university. She says it is “about ensuring the routes are available, the opportunities are available, but also young people are able to make the choice that suits them and suits their needs”.
Answering that question (below) from the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, May distinguishes between those she says benefit from university education and those who do not.
I think it is important that both students and tax payers contribute. I think it’s important that students contribute because, as the secretary of state [for education] said at the weekend, you’ve got two groups of people: those who go from university and benefit from going to university; and those who do not.
And we think that those who benefit from going to university should make a contribution to that.
What the review is going to do is to look at that, ensuring that the system is fair both to students and tax payers and ensuring that it is a system that is genuinely open to people from whatever their background.
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Theresa May is asked whether tax payers will have to contribute more in future.
She says it is important that “students” and “tax payers” each pay a contribution and says some sections of society benefit from going to university, while others do not. But she does not directly address the question.
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The prime minister is now taking questions from journalists. She is asked why she has not committed to reducing interest rates on debts and reintroducing maintenance grants.
May says the government has taken action: it has raised the repayment threshold and has frozen fees.
It is time to take action to ensure that the system is “flexible enough to ensure that everyone gets the education that suits them”, Theresa May says.
The prime minister says the review will focus on four key questions:
- Ensuring everyone can access higher education
- The funding system
- Incentivising choice and competition
- How to deliver the skills the country needs.
The review will look at “the whole question of how students and graduates contribute to their education”, May says. She adds that she believes that university students should make a contribution towards their degree.
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May claims that Labour’s policy to make fees free would mean tax hikes for the majority who don’t go to uni, force unis to compete with hospitals and schools for funding and result in cap being reintroduced on numbers.
— Anushka Asthana (@GuardianAnushka) February 19, 2018
May is in the difficult position of having to acknowledge what’s not working within the further education sector, while knowing that a government of which she was a senior member was responsible for creating it in its current form.
Theresa May gives Labour the soundbite it will run over and over and over again as she says “we now have one of the most expensive systems... in the world” as she launches review of higher education.
— Jack Maidment (@jrmaidment) February 19, 2018
May says those who benefit from higher education should bear its costs and that it would be unfair to place it on society as a whole because many people did not go to university and, generally, earn less.
Review will look at whole question of how students pay - principle that students and taxpayers both contribute is an important one, she says
— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) February 19, 2018
'it's only fair', May says, that people who benefit from education should contribute directly, to their education, to do otherwise would lead to tax increases + higher education to compete with NHS + schools for cash + a cap on numbers she claims
— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) February 19, 2018
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May repeats her “other people’s children” line from earlier (see 11.33am), saying the country needs to recognise the alternative of a technical education.
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May invokes the image of a second child: a middle-class girl who wants to be a software developer, but who is told she must go to university, rather than following a different path.
Neither situation is beneficial for the country, May says.
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May asks her audience to imagine a working-class boy at a state school who aspires to make it in the legal profession. His road will be more challenging than that of a boy from private school, she says.
May says that working class boy from Derby who wants to become lawyer has odds stacked against him, quoting over representation of privately educated in top universities.
— Anushka Asthana (@GuardianAnushka) February 19, 2018
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Pm references her 1997 maiden speech on education when she says she argued that every child should get right opportunities- whether vocational or academic. Trying to stress that this is something that genuinely drives her.
— Anushka Asthana (@GuardianAnushka) February 19, 2018
May says the students she has met today in London and Derby will be starting their careers in the “new economies” that will emerge in the next decade or two. The Britain of the 2020s will be outside the European Union and will have different relationships with nations across the world.
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May is opening her speech at Derby college. As my colleague Anushka Asthana points out, there are not many students in the audience.
Half term at Derby college - so not sure there are many students here to watch the pm and education secretary @DamianHinds pic.twitter.com/lP665l54nL
— Anushka Asthana (@GuardianAnushka) February 19, 2018
The education minister, Damian Hinds, is at the podium in Derby, where Theresa May is about to give her much-trailed speech on the government’s post-18 education review. Anyone needing a primer would do well to start here:
Downing Street has dismissed calls for an early Commons vote on plans to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600 (See 10.38am). The prime minister’s spokesman said she remained committed to delivering “more equal and updated” constituency boundaries which better reflected the distribution of voters around the UK.
Asked whether Theresa May was planning to go ahead with the reforms set in train by her predecessor David Cameron, the spokesman said:
Yes. The Boundary Commission is due to report in September with their proposals for revised constituencies. The final proposals must then be debated and approved by Parliament for them to take effect.
We are committed to delivering more equal and updated boundaries so our parliamentary system represents everyone equally.
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A new political party hoping to halt Brexit and run candidates in all 650 constituencies at the next general election was launched in Westminster today in an optimistic attempt to capitalise on what its leaders said was disenchantment with established political parties.
Renew has no high-profile candidates or donors and is led by three principals who have almost no previous political experience, although the philosopher AC Grayling was present at today’s launch, saying he was “rooting for” the party and any other anti-Brexit civil society initiative.
James Clarke, a principal and the party’s head of outreach, said he spoke to Labour voters furious that their party had been “hijacked by the hard left” and former Tory voters who were appalled at what they saw as “political cowardice” by the party’s pro-Brexit policy.
Any new political party faces the considerable challenge of winning meaningful support in the context of the first-past-the-post electoral system. Another of the party’s principals, James Torrance, stood as an independent in Kensington, west London, at the last election, winning 393 votes.
Renew says it has 1,000 supporters and has selected 200 candidates. Its organisers say they have been in dialogue with members of Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche movement in France, although it remains separate from the new technocratic party.
A third principal, Sandra Khadhouri, said she used to work in conflict zones for the UK government and international organisations. “My last job was working in Georgia for Nato. I had to decide which conflict zone to go to next, and I decided it had to be Britain.”
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Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, has compared a dead monkey’s head to a Labour backbencher.
Johnson muttered the remark after asking officers what species a trophy monkey was during a visit to a police unit that confiscates wildlife products, Press Association reports. A police officer suggested a macaque, but Johnson said:
What’s this poor chap here? Faint air of a ... Labour backbencher.
He made the comment at the Metropolitan police’s wildlife crime unit in London, where some of the items recovered from raids on the black market are stored.
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Peter Hain, a former Northern Ireland secretary, has urged Labour to “lead the resistance” to any hard border on Ireland post-Brexit.
Hain swung behind the leader of the Irish nationalist party, the SDLP, which wrote to Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, today urging him to oppose a hard Brexit because of its implications for the Irish frontier.
Colum Eastwood, the SDLP leader, said in the letter that Brexit has the potential to “dismantle” the Good Friday agreement. Supporting Eastwood’s analysis, Hain said:
Colum Eastwood, of our sister party the SDLP, is right to warn of the dangers Brexit poses to the Northern Ireland peace process and to urge Labour to do all it can to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.
The former secretary of state, who is a leading figure in the pro-European Open Britain group, added:
Labour must stand firmly behind the agreements between the British and Irish governments and the Northern Ireland parties on which the peace process rests. Already Brextremists on the Conservative benches are calling for these to be torn up precisely because they stand in the way of a hard Brexit.
Labour must lead the resistance any moves to a hard border and to insist that Theresa May stands up to the extremists in her party who insist on dragging her ever further to the right.
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There is been some reaction to the lines being trailed before Theresa May’s speech on the post-18 education review, which she is to give in Derby this afternoon. The full details on what May is expected to say are here:
Reacting to the news this afternoon, Nick Hillman, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said:
The key question is how much room for manoeuvre they [the review panel] are going to have in terms of public spending.
He questioned whether the panel could be asked to come up with proposals that do not involve an increase in public spending or being allowed to “spend real money”.
Sally Hunt, the general secretary of the University and College Union, said:
The prime minister can complain about how we have one of the most expensive systems of university tuition in the world, but it was the Conservatives that introduced it and without a radical look at the whole system little can really change.
Worryingly, this review already looks like little more than finding new ways to cut spending on universities. Linking the price of some degrees to earnings is deeply flawed and fails to acknowledge the many factors which affect graduate income.
Alistair Jarvis, the chief executive of vice-chancellors’ group Universities UK, said:
A cut in tuition fees may seem like an easy political solution, but it would see universities in England struggle to provide students with the world-class education they currently enjoy.
Unless a cut to fees is met in full from other funding sources, we risk returning to a system where courses are seriously underfunded or the number of places capped. That would be bad for graduate skills and the economy, for social mobility and for student choice.
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Here’s the full report on Theresa May’s appearance on ITV’s This Morning programme today from my colleagues, Peter Walker and Jessica Elgot:
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David Laws, who served as a Liberal Democrat minister in the coalition government that oversaw the hike in tuition fees to £9,000 a year and now chairs the Education Policy Institute thinktank, warned against raising expectations of significant cuts to tuition fees.
The government needs to rescue its post-18 funding review from the major risk that it builds expectations of a significant and politically inspired cut to tuition fees, which would largely benefit higher earning graduates and do precious little to improve the UK’s social mobility, or our low skills post-16.
The prize here is the opportunity to improve the funding of post-18 technical education – possibly by squeezing the funding of the lower cost courses currently subsidised by £9,250 fees. Students also need much better information about the economic consequences of the courses and institutions which they select.
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A little more detail on May’s comments on “old fashioned” attitudes about technical education. She told This Morning:
For a long time, I’ve worried about the fact that in this country we’re very good at saying academic education is good and for everybody, but we’ve never put sufficient emphasis on technical and vocational education.
The prime minister added:
We’ve got to break this old fashioned attitude that there’s only one way through in education, and we’ve got to say, I’ve always believed that what we should say is ‘what’s right for every young person? What’s right for every child?’ Because education can unlock the door of your future.
May was asked about the government’s plan to spend £5m – or £300 per primary school, as This Morning put it – on training teachers to spot mental health problems in children.
I have actually seen some of these teachers being trained in the mental health toolkit and what I found from them was that, actually, they welcomed the fact that they were being given this support because, often, it’s the teacher that the individual goes to.
Asked how the average of £300 per school is going to cover that, May said the teachers need training so they can help young people who do come forward to them. But she offered no specifics in response to the question.
And that’s that. In all, there wasn’t much more detail on May’s priority for the day: the education review. But she did cover mental health and bullying; more of which we’ll bring you soon.
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Asked if she’s enjoying her job, the prime minister says yes. “There’s huge issues to be dealing with but it’s worthwhile,” she adds.
Schofield asks May if she doesn’t spend a lot of her time looking behind her to “make sure someone isn’t about to stab you in the back”. No, May insists, she is getting on with the job.
Asked if she can “hang on”, if she “feels secure”, she says: “Yes, I’m doing the job.”
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The prime minister is discussing keeping young people safe online. Schofield asks whether a single national government can do that. “We have to start here and we have to then work with the companies themselves,” she says.
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May is being asked about mental healthcare and dealing with bullying. She says some schools do not want to admit the latter is happening in their institutions because of concerns about what it will say about the school.
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May says a lot of people have been encouraged to go to university, even if it’s not the right path for them.
Asked whether it would be possible to become prime minister without a university education, Theresa May says yes and cites one of her predecessors, John Major. But she agrees with Philip Schofield that Major is in a class of one in that respect in recent British history.
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May says “some issues have arisen” with the fees regime the government, of which she was a senior member, introduced.
Asked about reintroducing maintenance grants, which Labour have promised to do, May says it is one of the issues the review will consider.
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Theresa May is now on the sofa. She’s discussing the review of post-18 education. May says she understands the concerns around the debts people build up but also wanted to look at routes into technical education, rather than university.
Asked whether she thought there was an element of snobbery, she says some people think technical education is for “other people’s children” and that that stigma needs to be removed.
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Elections watchdogs have launched an investigation into the Scottish Liberal Democrats’ spending in the 2016 Holyrood campaign. The Electoral Commission confirmed it received a complaint and was looking at whether or not the party’s return was “true and accurate”.
It is understood the investigation will consider whether spending was correctly attributed between the party and the candidates.
The Liberal Democrats insisted all spending was “apportioned correctly” and said it had “full confidence” that there was no substance to the complaint.
It comes four months after Scottish prosecutors announced no action was being taken against a Liberal Democrat MSP after Police Scotland conducted an investigation into his campaign spending. Alex Cole-Hamilton won the Edinburgh West seat from the SNP by 2,960 votes in May 2016.
A spokesman for the Scottish Liberal Democrats said:
This is a classic SNP tactic when they have lost an election. Last year, they wasted 13 months of police time with their complaint about the election in Edinburgh Western, and the police found there was no case to answer.
All expenditure in this election was apportioned correctly and clearly identified in our election return which is a matter of public record. We have full confidence that there is no substance to this complaint.
Perhaps the SNP should spend less time whinging when they lose an election and more time addressing the problems they have created for themselves in education, health and the police service. It’s no wonder that their government are on the slide.
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The This Morning sofa remains a May-free zone for the moment. So, in the meantime, here’s some more quotes from her school visit. Asked about whether she would reinstate maintenance grants if the review recommends that, May told reporters:
Let’s not pre-empt what the review is going to do. The whole point of having the review is we recognise the concern that people have.
And, as I say, it’s not just the young people themselves, it’s their parents and their whole families worry about this.
So, it’s for the review to come forward with proposals so I’m not going to pre-empt it. Let’s see what they come forward with.
May is due to appear on ITV’s This Morning in about five minutes – we’ll cover that live.
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The prime minister also met sixth form pupils during the school visit this morning – ahead of her speech on post-18 education funding. Speaking to reporters, May said:
It’s been great listening to the students about their experience of making choices as to whether to go to university or do an apprenticeship.
What we’re doing today is announcing a review of higher education, of tertiary education, which is both about the whole question of the concern that students and parents and grandparents have of the cost of the debt that students get into when they go to university, the cost of fees and so forth, whether they’re getting value for money.
But it’s also about making sure that we have a system that enables students to make the right choices.
So for those for whom a technical education, a vocational education, or an apprenticeship is right, perhaps rather than going to university, that they’re able to be aware of the opportunities that are open to them.
And that we don’t see a sort of stigma attached to technical education, that people recognise that what’s important is what is right for every young person.
The prime minister, Theresa May, has been speaking to reporters during a school visit in west London. She called the latest revelations in the Oxfam scandal – that some witnesses were threatened – “absolutely horrific”.
It was far below the standards that we expect for the charities and the NGOs that we’re working with.
And I understand there have been further revelations today which show that actually there was physical intimidation of witnesses.
This is absolutely horrific. This is exactly the problem that we see which means that all too often people don’t feel able to come forward to report what has happened to them, the behaviour that they’ve been on the receiving end of.
She also addressed the allegations against Brendan Cox while he was working for Save the Children. May said he had recognised his behaviour “made women feel uncomfortable”.
I think what is important from a government point-of-view in dealing with these charities is we are demanding that these charities come forward in very short order and show us what their safeguarding, their protection arrangements are.
We will not work with anybody who does not meet the high standards that we set and we believe are important.
The external review of post-school education funding has been a long time coming, with internal battles within the government starting last summer, when Theresa May and aides first floated it as an idea for her party conference speech.
An external review was fiercely resisted by Justine Greening and other education ministers as being unnecessary. But May was so spooked by Labour’s youth vote that she ploughed on and ousted Greening as education secretary last month.
Greening has lost little time setting out her own ideas for reform in a blog post that went live on her personal website yesterday. It contains much more radical suggestions:
Firstly, maintenance grants should be reintroduced. To remove them was regressive and this mistake should be rectified. Under the current maintenance loan approach, students from lower income families less able to help them with living costs, come out with more debt, like for like, than their better off peers. That’s unfair and cannot be allowed to continue.
Secondly, the graduate contribution should stop paying off a ‘loan’ and instead be paid into a Higher Education Fund (akin to National Insurance funding the NHS/pensions).
There are suggestions the government found it hard to recruit panel members for the year-long review. The chair, Philip Augar, is best known as a financial writer but with little in the way of education credentials. Prof Alison Wolf is widely respected on vocational qualifications but has expressed traditionalist views on universities, including a limit on student numbers.
The chairman of an influential parliamentary committee, Bernard Jenkin, has told ministers: “If you want to make the choice, you need to make the choice now” on proposals to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600.
The public administration and constitutional affairs committee has warned that the existing plans are unlikely to pass a Commons vote and called for one to be brought forward from the autumn to allow time to decide on boundaries before the 2020 general election. He has told Sky News:
At the moment, the DUP are undeclared. We will not get it through if the DUP does not support this boundary review. There are a lot of Tories who don’t want it but whether they will actually vote against it is a moot point. But, if we vote against it in the autumn ... we could end up fighting a general election on boundaries that were designed for 2005.
The education secretary, Damian Hinds, has been putting some more meat on the bones of the prime minister’s forthcoming speech on the government’s further education review. Specifically, he’s been speaking to Sky News about the proposal to cut the interest rates on student loans.
The interest rate does serve an important purpose, which is to make the system more progressive, so people who do earn a lot of money in their 20s and 30s will end up contributing proportionately more than people who don’t earn those sums of money after they graduate.
But I don’t think you can look at it in isolation. I do understand the concerns that have been raised about that but the panel will look at all these different aspects and then the government review will respond.
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Another story that’s still getting some coverage this morning is the claim that the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was one of the party figures who unwittingly met a Czech communist spy in the 1980s.
The Sun has been pushing the story but it’s the Daily Mail that splashes on it this morning, while the issue also gets a slot on the front of the Daily Telegraph (see 8.30am).
Monday’s @DailyMailUK #MailFrontPages pic.twitter.com/4cCLRxHQMW
— Daily Mail U.K. (@DailyMailUK) February 18, 2018
The alleged spy says more than a dozen Labour MPs passed him information in the 1980s in return for thousands of pounds, according to the Mail.
A spokesman for Corbyn has previously said the Labour leader met a Czechoslovakian diplomat but “neither had nor offered any privileged information”. Labour has also criticised the defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, for lending credence to “false and ridiculous smears”.
The Guardian columnist, Matthew d’Ancona, has this take:
It is the gravest of mistakes to confuse change with a clean slate, and to allow modernity to become amnesia. By all means acquit Corbyn of the charge that his meetings with a Czech diplomat in the 80s make him unfit for the highest office in 2018. But don’t pretend that they are an irrelevance. Who controls the past controls the future, as all totalitarians know. But it is also true that those who insist upon understanding the past have the best chance of safeguarding both their own liberty and the prospects of progress. Be warned: the idea of “year zero” only has value to those with something to hide.
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May to set out plans to force down some university fees
Good morning and welcome to the politics live blog. The main story this morning is Theresa May’s attempt to take back control of the news agenda by talking about something that’s not Brexit.
In a speech to be delivered in Derby this afternoon, the prime minister will set out how she believes the government can reverse a trend that “leaves students from the lowest-income households bearing the highest levels of debt” and force cuts to the fees charged for some courses.
May will announce a review of education funding for over-18s in England that the new education secretary, Damian Hinds, has already hinted is likely to recommend that some institutions cut fees for social science and humanities courses; particularly where recent graduates have earned lower salaries.
But the proposals have received short shrift from May’s party colleagues and the higher education sector.
Most of this morning’s papers feature the story prominently.
Guardian front page, Monday 19 February 2018: May warning to universities over high cost of tuition fees pic.twitter.com/0PvP8qUz1n
— The Guardian (@guardian) February 18, 2018
Tomorrow's front page: Savers lose millions to retirement fraudsters #tomorrowspapertoday pic.twitter.com/wnm0stReQV
— The Times of London (@thetimes) February 18, 2018
The front page of tomorrow's Daily Telegraph: 'Hidden calories fuelling obesity' #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/l8a6HMYV4K
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) February 18, 2018
Monday's i: Tuition fee reforms 'will be divisive' #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/J2Oyuj7JH1
— Helena Lee (@BBCHelenaLee) February 18, 2018
Monday's Metro: "PM: Uni fees unfair and poor value" #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/VTv9dhahOg
— Helena Lee (@BBCHelenaLee) February 18, 2018
Hammond to ditch red box – and announcements
The chancellor, Philip Hammond, will ditch the budget red box for a stripped-down spring statement with no major tax or spending announcements, the Treasury says. The story makes the front page of this morning’s Financial Times:
Monday's Financial Times: "Trump hits out at FBI inquiry and says Moscow is laughing at turmoil" #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/pttDioN58F
— Helena Lee (@BBCHelenaLee) February 18, 2018
Corbyn highlights problem of racist abuse
The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has warned that Muslim women are facing routine racist abuse on the streets of the UK, saying Islamophobia is a “real problem in our society, as is other forms of racism like antisemitism and racism against people of Afro-Caribbean heritage”.
This weekend, the party expelled an activist who had previously been suspended over allegations of anti-semitic abuse as it seeks to get a grip on the problem within its own ranks.
MP makes welcome return
The former cabinet minister, James Brokenshire, returns to parliament for the first time since he underwent lung surgery.
Pleased to say that I’ve been recovering strongly after my lung surgery a month ago. Have had incredible love and support from family and overwhelmed by so many kind emails, letters and messages. Will be back at Westminster when the Commons returns on Tuesday 👍 pic.twitter.com/UbGPKnUlU9
— James Brokenshire (@JBrokenshire) February 18, 2018
Boundary review in doubt
The government is facing calls for an early Commons vote on plans to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600. One is due in the autumn but a committee of MPs is warning it is unlikely to pass. If that happens, they say, it would be too late to carry out a fresh boundary review in time for the 2022 general election.
