Regardless of where you stand on the intrinsic merit of student tuition fees, the HE funding review being launched today is one which will inevitably descend into bad policy and terrible politics.

This is what will happen over the next year or so. I’d put money on it. Come back to me and wave this article in my face if I’m wrong.

Policy-wise, the Treasury will not allow full-fee abolition, or indeed a graduate tax. For all its theoretical merits, in the short term it’s very expensive. The government has to make up the funding shortfall to universities if they don’t want the sector to collapse - and even a graduate tax takes a while before sufficient revenues come on stream. Experts think that the cost of full fee abolition is about £6 billion a year. In the current fiscal climate - and with Brexit headwinds threatening the public finances - even a weakened chancellor will refuse to fund this. The Department for Education will also oppose the abolition of fees in this circumstance, because they don’t fancy being saddled with that bill.

So people will start casting around for other things that sound good and are cheap. We’ve had some of this already: a cut to some fees if you go to a university that ministers haven’t heard of, or do a course that isn’t approved of, or aren’t likely to earn enough to buy a flat in a nice part of London. That sort of thing. Or an interest-rate cut in fees, which sounds attractive but doesn’t reduce the monthly graduate repayment by one penny.

All of which is terrible policymaking. Especially if, as was being briefed this weekend, it’s funded by cutting one of the few things that help poorer students: the widening-participation pots of cash.

Understanding tuition fees

So why will it happen? Because no one who will be involved in the discussion really understands universities and what will and won’t work. Number 10 wants a big political statement. HMT wants this to go away and not cost any money. The DfE - home of universities - wants it to be something that pleases Number 10 and makes Damian Hinds look good, but also doesn’t cost them any money - and mostly which doesn’t really distract from the bigger departmental challenges around schools. Universities, which are used to being the biggest beast in their Whitehall home, suddenly find themselves without many powerful friends.

The result will be a three-way fight in which each department doesn’t really care about the policy, but all are agreed that a full fee cut won’t happen - and that something should, but that they shouldn’t be the ones to sort it out.  

Then, of course, the politics comes into play. As befits the leadership that previously brought you the General Election 2017, it is also quite possible that this will also go wrong.

Three problems

Political communication is normally simple: under-promise and over-deliver. This HE review has started in exactly the opposite way. Everyone expects full-fee abolition and nothing less. This has been briefed as the way the Conservatives will combat Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal to the youth. The only problem with that plan is…well there’s three. First, the Conservatives will never “out-Corbyn Corbyn”. They simply won’t offer the same appeal he does with a policy at this demographic. Second, the British Election Survey recently poured a lot of cold water on the “youthquake” theory that got the Conservatives so spooked. Third, to the extent that votes among students and young-ish graduates did turn to Labour last year, it turns out they voted much more on issues such as the NHS or school funding cuts - and not on student fees.

What will happen over the next few months is that lots of special advisers and political types who don’t understand HE will go around telling each other and journalists that something big will happen and it will pay huge political dividends. Then, best guess, we’ll end up with a small cut to headline fees, some tinkering on interest rates and maybe something on part-time students and on maintenance grants. Everyone who was expecting more - universities, students, other Conservative MPs, journalists - will be disappointed. It will be written up as a flop and aggressively briefed against within days of publication.

So, to recap: we’ll have a system that doesn’t solve the policy - or the politics - and risks distracting HMT, the DfE and Number 10 while there are more serious issues they need to grapple with. This is what Justine Greening and Jo Johnson had clocked and refused to make happen - and is largely why they were fired (more so, I hear, than grammars). It is a plan so conceptually flawed, off-beam policy-wise and politically inept that the most rational assumption I can come up with is that Conquest’s Third Law applies. Gavin Barwell, Number 10 chief of staff, must be a Russian sleeper agent.

The secret adviser works in Westminster, having spent several years working in education on both the political and non-political side, in charities and on campaigns, and has worked with ministers of all political parties

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