As the Labour Party Conference draws to a close, HEPI takes a look at what just happened

Nick Hillman, HEPI Director, bottles his thoughts about this year’s Labour Party Conference.

As multiple fringe events showed, when it comes to higher education the Labour Conference was very busy, with notably more vice-chancellors in attendance than in days of yore.

My Conference sojourn started on Saturday with a trip to Liverpool’s famous Cavern Club to watch the brilliant in-house Beatles tribute band. At the time, I mused about which fab-four song might best sum up the next few days. ‘Taxman’ perhaps?

(If you drive a car) I’ll tax the street

(If you try to sit) I’ll tax your seat

(If you get too cold) I’ll tax the heat

(If you take a walk) I’ll tax your feet

In fact, when it came to higher education, the big news was a giveaway rather than a new tax. I’ll always remember where I was when Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister (in the Manchester University Students’ Union shop). Perhaps education policy wonks will similarly always remember where they were when they heard maintenance grants were on their way back (albeit for a second time – they were last reintroduced in the mid-2000s before being abolished a decade later).

In my case, I was with dozens of others in a fascinating HEPI fringe event on students’ cost of living, chaired by my colleague Rose Stephenson and featuring Alex Stanley (NUS), Gavan Conlon (London Economics) and Nic Beech (University of Salford). This came hot on the heels of two other HEPI fringe events – one on public opinion and higher education featuring a bevy of vice-chancellors and another with Cambridge University Press and Assessment on ‘Quality Matters’.

It was no surprise the news about maintenance grants won a spontaneous round of applause. It reminded me of the cheer I got during a speech to the University of Derby in 2016, when I read out the breaking news that UKIP’s Leader had just stood down (‘Nigel Farage resigns’, the Guardian reported, ‘after “achieving political ambition”’).

In both instances, the initial reaction was premature. Brexit was not the end of Faragism and it quickly became clear in Liverpool that the return of maintenance grants is not quite what it first seemed either.

Bridget Phillipson’s tweet announcing the change said:

Access to our colleges and universities shouldn’t just be for a wealthy few.

That’s why I’m bringing back maintenance grants for those who need them most.

Labour is ambitious for all our young people, no matter their background. I’m putting our values into action.

Most people who have calculated the cost of reintroducing grants have assumed it would cost something in the region of £2 billion a year. However, Ministers plan to fund the new grants via the proposed levy on international students’ fees, which is expected to raise around £600 million. So entitlement to the new means-tested grants will, it turns out, be limited by students’ course choice. You will be quids in only if you are studying what the politicians want you to study. 

As I noted at the King’s College London Policy Institute fringe meeting on Wednesday afternoon, funding the new grants from the new levy may seem like clever politics, at least inside Number 10 and the Treasury and also perhaps by anyone seeking election as the Labour Party’s Deputy Leader.

Students and vice-chancellors have been desperate for grants to return and rightly so – for the reasons why, see our recent report on a Minimum Income Standard for Students with TechnologyOne and Loughborough University. But the levy / tariff / tax on international students is hated by those same students and vice-chancellors, putting them in something of a bind when it comes to responding to the Government’s announcement.

Not only do international students typically come from countries that are poorer than the UK, but they are already subsidising UK research and the teaching of domestic students. Now they are expected to contribute towards the day-to-day living costs of poorer home students too (just so long as those UK students are studying courses deemed to be of most economic value). Just how broad do Ministers think international students’ shoulders are?

Many of them come from wealthy backgrounds but some do not have very deep pockets and none is obliged to study in the UK rather than elsewhere. So our higher education institutions are unlikely to be able to pass on the full 6% without seeing a drop in demand.

It was great to witness so many backbench Labour MPs, like Alex Sobel, Daniel Zeichner, Abtisam Mohamed and Dr Lauren Sullivan, advocating for UK universities across the conference fringe programme. But more generally, there were parts of the Conference that felt flat as well as parts that were presumably in line with what the organisers wanted – including the Leader’s big set-piece speech. Starmer’s big reveal was the rejection of the ancient 50% target for young people’s participation in higher education in preference for a new target ‘That two-thirds of our children should go either to university… Or take a gold standard apprenticeship.’

The Prime Minister would be unlikely to welcome the comparison but this reminded me of nothing so much as David Cameron’s pledges as Prime Minister. In 2013, for example, Cameron said: ‘I want us to have as a new norm the idea that in school, everybody, everyone who can, either takes that path on to university, or takes that path on to an apprenticeship. You should be doing one or the other.’

The challenge is not coming up with such commitments; it is delivering them. Fewer adults are doing apprenticeships now than when David Cameron spoke, despite the introduction of an Apprenticeship Levy. Perhaps Starmer can succeed where Cameron and his successors failed…

At the end of the Conference, I was left feeling the biggest omission compared to past Labour Conferences was a clear and broad narrative about His Majesty’s Official Opposition: the Conservative Party. If the choice facing the country really is between ‘division’ and ‘decency’, as Keir Starmer says, then might not the best way to defeat division be, as with Le Pen in France or the AfD in Germany, for centre-right and centre-left parties to act together?

If Tony Blair and William Hague can work together, surely this is not impossible? But – and this is a personal opinion only – I left Liverpool wondering if the main problem for today’s Labour leadership is that they have spent the last 15 years making such strong criticisms of their bedfellows in the mainstream centre of British politics that they are unable to admit they may now need to work with the centre-right to stave off their worst fears.

Then again, perhaps today’s Tory Party also cannot see that the opposite of division is not so much ‘decency’ (however much we might want that) as collaboration. We’ll find out for certain next week as the policy caravan moves across the north-west to Manchester for the Conservative Party Conference. Do come to HEPI’s event there if you can – it is outside the secure zone so no expensive pass is needed.

Carole Cox, HEPI’s Events and Communications Administrator (and HEPI’s biggest Beatles’s fan) explains why Liverpool is the perfect place for day-trippers and long-stayers.

The City of Liverpool has the biggest single collection of Grade One listed buildings than any other English city outside London and it was named the European Capital of Culture in 2008. A football mecca, it also boasts a plethora of museums, including the World Museum, the International Slavery Museum, the Museum of Liverpool, Tate Liverpool and the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

It is also an interestingly quirky place, which harbours some amazing public toilets (you read that right). For example, if you ever happen to drop into the Philharmonic Dining Rooms in the Georgian Quarter, feel free to admire the famous Grade I-listed urinals in their pink marble splendour.

And then, there is the deservedly famous Mersey Beat. Liverpool and The Beatles, these are words that go together well.* The Liverpudlian group are considered the best-selling band in music history, hailed as pioneers who revolutionised the music industry and popular culture.

In summary, Liverpool is a ‘blast’ in more ways than one: a city which does not shy away from its heritage, a city with so much to offer culturally, but also a windy city open to the strong maritime winds gusting from the docks. Which may be why the French translation of the 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night is Les Quatre Garçons Dans Le Vent, a French colloquial idiom for their growing popularity – which, when translated word-for-word, awkwardly reads as ‘the four boys in the wind’.

* ‘these are words that go together well’ are lyrics from the 1965 Beatles song Michelle (Lennon/McCartney).