§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Lang.]
2.30 pm§ Mr. John Powley (Norwich, South)I am grateful, Mr. Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in my first Adjournment debate on a subject of importance not just to my constituents but to students in other parts of the country and at universities other than the University of East Anglia. I am also grateful to the Minister for coming to the House on a Friday afternoon to answer the debate.
It is appropriate that I should be moving the Adjournment debate on student travel costs, as we discussed at some length earlier today hon. Members' travel costs. The amounts involved in Members' travel costs substantially exceed those involved in student travel costs.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science announced on 4 April 1984 that there would be changes in the method of paying student travel costs. It quickly became apparent that the change might affect some students and universities. I say "some" to emphasise the point, because not all students and universities will be affected. I shall deal with the effects during the course of my speech.
I applaud the efforts of the Department of Education and Science and local authorities to try to streamline the administration of the system and so concentrate more of the available resources on helping students and using less of the resources on bureaucracy.
Under the old system of reimbursing student travel costs, £50 was included in the annual student grant whether the student lived at home or away. A student claimed from his local authority reimbursement of the necessary additional costs that he was obliged to incur. In reality, that meant claiming a return journey once a term from the student's home to the university or college and daily journeys to and from the college. The system, in which it was difficult accurately to predict the costs, involved some £46 million, with an average travel award in 1982–83 of £63.
The figures that I obtained from Norfolk county council showed that for the academic year 1983–84 there were 4,152 mandatory award holders. The total expenditure to those mandatory award holders for travel costs was £260,000. That is for travel in excess of the £50 which is included in the grant calculation. Under the new scheme introduced for the 1984–85 year, students will receive a flat-rate sum as part of their grant to cover travel costs. Students studying at home will receive £160 and those studying away will receive £100. Provision has been made for those existing students with exceptional and unavoidable high travel expenses more than £150 above what they would normally receive to claim reimbursement of the excess.
At first sight, the idea is commendable and the averaging of costs may seem an economical way to deal with the matter. The Minister said that there was an element of rough justice in the system, which of course there is. However, I suggest that there are other factors to consider, and that is part of the reason why I have raised the matter today.
Until now there has been a uniform system of student travel grants throughout England, Northern Ireland, Wales 690 and Scotland. That made sense. It did not matter where one lived or came from, because the system was the same. With the proposed change, there will be a difference between Scotland and the rest of Great Britain. Scotland keeps the existing system, as was announced by the Secretary of State for Scotland on 13 February this year, while everyone else changes. I do not see why or how there can be so much difference between Scotland and the rest of Great Britain to warrant a difference in travel grants.
It cannot be questioned that some colleges and universities are more accessible than others. Some are in more remote areas of the country. Such an area in Norfolk and such a university is the University of East Anglia. My hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Mr. Thompson) and I have explained on several occasions the difficulties that are involved in getting up into Norfolk because of the lack of dual carriageways and the relative inaccessibility of Norwich.
Travel costs to and from such places are much more expensive than those to and from universities in large cities in more central areas. When a student is deciding which college or university is suitable for him, he may use the travel costs that are involved as one of the deciding factors, when the decision should be based on education only. That is something that worries me and many others. It may be said that parents should make a contribution to these costs, but many do not do so, for a wide variety of reasons. Travel costs to and from university and home are a factor, and another factor is the situation of the university and the availability of student accommodation.
I have received about 650 letters, cards and representations of various sorts from students in my constituency. The pile of cards on the bench beside me is well over 6in high. Most of them are from students, but some are from parents of students who realise that extra travel costs will be involved. They have written to tell me how difficult it will be for them to help their children.
What are the extra costs that will be incurred? How many students will be affected? What are the knock-on problems? It must be admitted that some students will be better off. They will be students with less-than-average travel costs, and no doubt they will count themselves lucky. The National Union of Students calculates that the change will mean some form of hardship to one third of all students. It says that the change will affect 47 per cent. of home-based students and 32 per cent. of away-from-home students. It calculates that, over the spectrum of student travel costs which were reimbursed in 1982–83, 39 per cent. had excess costs of more than £100, 26 per cent. had excess costs of more than £150 per annum and 2 per cent. had excess costs of more than £450 per annum.
I have been in touch with students at the University of East Anglia and I am grateful to them for their help. Tim Quint is such a student and he lives at Hook Green, Kent. He has provided me with a breakdown of his travel costs. His British Rail student railcard costs £10. The Norwich citywide bus pass costs £48 per term and £144 annually. His rail travel from home to university costs £16 a term and £48 yearly. The grand total for his travel costs last year was £202. If the £50 that is already included in the grant is deducted, he was entitled to receive £150. I have a copy of his actual grant from Kent county council, which was £144.80. If this pattern of costs is repeated under the new system, my constituent will be about £52 a year worse off.
691 Another constituent tells me that his bus and rail costs and his railcard cost him £279 and that after the deduction of the £50 and £100 flat allowance he is £129 worse off.
The knock-on effect is not easy to determine. As in all walks of life, some students are less responsible than others. Some students waste some of their money and then complian that they are broke and cannot afford certain items. Others behave in a responsible fashion and budget as you and I, Mr. Speaker, budget our income and expenditure. Could it be that the money needed for travel costs, which some students will now get, will have to come from moneys allocated to meet normal living expenses? Could it be that the money needed for travel costs will have to come from moneys allocated for the purchase of books and equipment? Will a potential student have to take account of possible travel costs before deciding which university to attend? Could it be that a student will have to pass by a course which his talents dictate he should go to and take a different course which is based at an establishment within his travel allowance?
There is a problem for a large number of students who have to travel long distances between where they live in town while at a university and the university. At the University of East Anglia in my constituency, the residence belonging to the univserity at Fifers lane in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North is four or five miles away and the current costs of travel between the two is more than £120 per year. My hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North has apologised to me for not being here for this debate, but I assure my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State that he fully supports the arguments that I am putting forward.
The University of East Anglia was deliberately sited away from the major centre of population on the periphery of Norwich, and that will now work to its disadvantage. The position is even more marked in some other parts of the country, and Lancaster and Warwick are good examples. During the past few days colleagues have mentioned examples from their own constituencies. It is possible for universities to be selected for their geographical location rather than their academic qualities. That would put universities such as the University of East Anglia at a disadvantage.
The new system of travel grants will force students to keep their travel costs between their residences and their universities as low as possible. That factor will in turn put pressure on living accommodation in the near vicinity of the university. That will cause problems of overcrowding, sharing and multiple occupation of dwellings. One could say that students should in any case keep their costs down, and one would be right. With claims having to be submitted and scrutinised as they are now, abuses are kept to a minimum. Some universities provide specialised courses which, to make them viable, need to attract students from a wide area. It could be that because of the travel implications those courses could not be offered, and consequently the variety of courses offered could diminish and our overall education standards could drop.
On 15 May 1984, in reply to a question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North, the Under-Secretary of State said:
However, I am confident that it will be possible on a local basis to find enterprising solutions to the problem that my hon. Friend has described." — [Official Report, 15 May 1984; Vol. 60, c. 136.]692 I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State will expand on that statement and say what he had in mind.I have been in touch with the vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia about the problem. He made a suggestion which I put forward for serious consideration.
He asked:
Is it possible to classify students either as living on campus with a lower rate of travel grant; or as living off campus whether at home or in lodgings or in University residences and to award this category a higher rate of grant?The question that must be faced in the future with travel costs being integrated into the total grant is: what happens when an uprating occurs in future years? Under the present system, if fares are increased by British Rail or a local bus company, the student is no worse or no better off, because he claims the cost of the journeys actually made. In future, if no change is made in the present proposals and the travel costs increase by more than the percentage increase in total grant, somehow those extra costs must be borne. That means that those students who have higher than average costs will be faced with an even greater disadvantage than they are now.Will my hon. Friend the Secretary of State give an assurance that in future, if no change is forthcoming, the increases in travel costs will be accurately reflected in the uprating of total grant? I hope that my hon. Friend will take my point seriously and consider the wider implications of the changes that have been proposed. I hope that he will seriously reconsider those proposals in the light of the examples that I have quoted and the longer-term effect which these changes in the travel grant could have.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mr. Peter Brooke)I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Powley) for raising an important issue in such a constructive way. Students at the University of East Anglia are indeed fortunate to be represented by a Member who clearly has their interests so closely at heart and is able to present their case in such a lucid and eloquent manner. He has, if I may say so, been more eloquent than the identical postcards which arrived in profusion from his constituents.
In order to explain why the new arrangements are necessary, I think it might be helpful to describe the present arrangments for travel costs. At the moment, there is an element within the student grant—currently £50—which is intended to cover expenditure on travel. For very many students—in fact, more than half—that allowance more than covers their travel need, but those who spend more than that are entitled to claim reimbursement of any expenditure necessarily incurred over and above that in attending their course. It includes the cost of three return journeys a year between the student's home and his place of study when he is studying away from home, and the cost of daily journeys to and from his place of study from his term-time residence. The essence of the present arrangements is that each student is reimbursed individually any excess travel cost that he incurs on the basis of separate specific travel claims.
That approach has two major drawbacks. First, it is administratively cumbersome, and therefore expensive. In the academic year 1982–83 — the latest for which information is available—local education authorities 693 received claims for reimbursement of excess travel expenditure from about 180,000 students, for about 43.5 per cent. of all full-value award holders. Each of those claims has to be processed individually and checked not only for its arithmetic, but, more importantly, for the accuracy of the number and length of journeys claimed, and the bus and rail fares quoted. The process is, therefore, inherently expensive in terms of manpower, and thus of cost. The difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that up to 90 per cent. of the claims handled by a paying local education authority relate to areas for which it is not responsible and with which it may not be familiar.
Secondly, the arrangements effectively represent an uncontrollable and open-ended commitment to public expenditure. The sums paid by local education authorities in respect of excess travel claims will naturally reflect the number of claimants and the size of the claims made, and those cannot be precisely estimated in advance. While I do not believe that students necessarily travel by more expensive modes than they need to, the present arrangements offer little incentive to students to choose the most economical practical means — for example, by using coach rather than rail, or by sharing cars. The new arrangements axe designed to overcome those two major drawbacks by introducing flat rates.
It is surely wrong to continue a system which is administratively expensive to operate and does not ensure that public money is under as close control as it could be. I was encouraged to learn that the vice-chancellor of the university of East Anglia, Professor Michael Thompson, sympathised with the rationale of the proposed changes, even though he expressed concern about the new rates. I shall return later to his suggestion which my hon. Friend mentioned.
Under the new arrangements, as my hon. Friend said, the present allowance within the grant for travel will be increased from £50 to £100 for those studying away from the parental home, and to £160 for those studying from the parental home. A limited number of categories of student will continue to be eligible for reimbursement, but the majority of students will not. Those incurring travel costs in excess of the amount allowed in the grant, because they are required to spend part of their courses abroad—such as those following the American studies course at the university of East Anglia — or away from the main establishment, will continue to have the relevant travel cost in excess of the amount provided in the grant reimbursed in full. Disabled students, who incur excess travel costs in respect of attendance on their course as a result of their disability, will also be entitled to claim reimbursement.
My hon. Friend has discussed in some detail the position of students at the University of East Anglia who will be made worse off as a result of the new arrangements. We have always acknowledged that the new arrangements would inevitably involve a degree of rough justice, and my hon. Friend quoted me in that respect. That is an inevitable consequence of any departure from a system which treats each student individually. But, equally inevitably, many students will gain; indeed, more will gain than lose. In the academic year 1982–83, 56.5 per cent. of all full-value award holders — about 235,000 students — made no 694 claims for excess travel, and under the new arrangements all those students will gain £50 or £110, depending on where they study from.
Many students at the University of East Anglia will gain under the new arrangements. I understand that about 1,500—or more than one third of the university's population—live on University Plain. Those students should not normally face day-to-day travel expenses and so are likely to gain under the new approach. The position of those living in the city or at Fifers lane, about whom my hon. Friend spoke so eloquently, is less clear-cut, and will depend on the particular circumstances of the individual. Some who do not face high term-end travel costs, or who are able to benefit from cheap means of daily travel, may still gain, but I readily concur that inevitably some will find themselves worse off.
Students are, by their nature, intelligent and flexible people, and I am confident that "creative solutions" — again, my hon. Friend picked up that quotation—can be found to most of the particular problems that have emerged. It will, of course, be for individual students to decide how best to deploy the resources available to them. Where they consider the cost of public transport to be too high, I am sure that there is scope for private enterprise on the part of students themselves, their student unions, or institutions to act collectively to provide cheaper means of travelling to and from their places of study—to take just one example, by operating car-sharing schemes. Such solutions have not been sought before because the open-endedness of the present arrangements never encouraged them. I believe that it will be a positive bonus of the new arrangements if students are encouraged to think more carefully about how they travel to and from college.
We have also acted to take account of the real and well-founded concern expressed to us during the consultative period about some students already on courses who have exceptionally high travelling costs and little real possibility of changing their circumstances in mid course. We listened sympathetically to those concerns, and in response we announced that provision will be made for existing students whose unavoidable travel costs are more than £150 above what they will receive in grant to claim reimbursement of the excess. That should alleviate the worst of the difficulties that the introduction of the new arrangements would otherwise have created for existing students.
My hon. Friend made several related points to which I should like to respond. He referred to the Scottish situation. The provisions of the students' allowance scheme in Scotland have never been identical in all respects to the awards system in England and Wales. The decision by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland to retain the present travel arrangements for Scottish students took account of the special circumstances that he considered would have made it inappropriate at present to adopt the flat-rate approach. That divergence in approach is an inevitable consequence of the devolution process.
My hon. Friend referred to the suggestion of his vice-chancellor, which I have already mentioned. The vice-chancellor said that those who studied away from home but also had daily journeys from their term-time residence should become a special category. I appreciate the attractions of that suggestion, but I am afraid that it runs wholly counter to one of the main purposes of the change that we are introducing, which is to simplify rather than 695 complicate the present arrangements. I understand why the suggestion has been made, but I can hold out no hope that such a scheme will be entertained or implemented in future.
My hon. Friend asked me whether I would consider the matter again and contemplate special arrangements for hardship cases. In the latter instance, I have already referred to the alleviation scheme that we are introducing for existing students, but overall at this stage one can do no more than speculate on what effect, if any, the new arrangements will have on particular institutions and individual students. Should any hard evidence emerge in future years, we would be prepared to consider it. Consequently, we shall follow developments.
The new arrangements represent an important change in practice. Inevitably, a change of this magnitude involves both benefits and costs, but I believe that the benefits, which I have outlined, outweigh the costs. Our proposals involve a degree of rough justice but I do not believe that they imply an unacceptable degree. The 696 majority of students will be better off under the new arrangements and we have taken steps to limit the losses for existing students.
The proposals will bring under closer control an important area of public expenditure on which the taxpayer and the ratepayer will probably spend £39 million this year — by no means an insignificant sum — and will significantly simplify local authority administration. No decision has so far been made about the separate uprating of travel grant, but I recognise the force of my hen. Friend's argument.
I am sure my hon. Friend will agree that it is in the interests of everyone — students, local authorities, institutions, taxpayers and ratepayers—to have a cost-effective student award system. I think that our proposals work towards this, but I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for giving me the opportunity to respond to the debate this afternoon.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at four minutes to Three o'clock.