Mandy Slatter

STUDENT LOAN NEWS: The Treasury Committee of MPs has put out its report into student loans. Here's my view:- I’ve long condemned the Chancellor’s planned freeze of the student loan repayment threshold next April as immoral and a breach of natural justice. So today is an important moment, as the cross-party Treasury Committee of MPs echoes this language in calling out a “moral obligation” for this to be reversed. Changing terms for future students is a political choice, but that’s not what is planned next year. Freezing the threshold on existing Plan 2 loans effectively increases the amount those with those loans must repay each year. It is a retrospective, one-sided contractual change that would not be allowed in almost any other circumstance or sector. Worse, those hit often signed these contracts while just 18, with little or no explanation of what they were getting into. This has to stop, and never be allowed again. That’s why one of the Committee’s most important proposals is that the Government should effectively be bound by the same Consumer Duty for student loans as a commercial lender, backed by proper fairness rules. Though it is only taking about student loan promotions, I think it should be for all student loan behaviour. I have been pushing for this for over a decade. In 2016 we even got Wes Streeting, then a new MP, to propose FCA regulation of student loans and place restrictions on negative changes as a parliamentary amendment. It was rejected. Had that protection been in place, it could have stopped successive governments tinkering with the system, resulting in a horrific degradation of the original terms. I hope this report, feeding into a new administration, means there is now a realistic chance of stopping the planned freeze and any future freezes. Yet let’s be clear: that alone will not fix the Plan 2 student loan crisis - it’ll just stop it getting even worse. The report is titled "Student loans: broken and unfair?". There is no need for the question mark. The repayment threshold should be many thousands of pounds higher, interest should be reduced, maintenance thresholds need uprating, and the whole system, including the way it is communicated, needs a fundamental reset. Here is the report: committees.parliament.uk/com… Here is the MSE submission to the report: committees.parliament.uk/wri…