I return to the subject of this column published on October 15^th: the student loans system; I concentrated then –as did most of my email correspondence- on the question of the level of fees and the debt with which students are left, but since the Chancellor’s decision to raise the income threshold from £21,000 to £25,000, below which no repayments are made, my correspondence has shifted to the question of the interest rate charged on loans.

 

My emails complain that the rate of 6% is ‘daylight robbery’, and that the extra money should have been spent reducing the interest rate for everyone with a student loan rather than raising the repayment threshold which only helps those who will be on incomes below it.

 

I give two answers. First, it is always best to concentrate relief where it is most needed and this is better done by raising the threshold to protect those on the lowest incomes. Second, the complaint betrays an ignorance of the student loan interest rate system (I don’t blame them for that, because it’s complicated, and it is complicated in order to be fair to students, very few of whom will be paying 6%.)

 

The Government introduced a new tiered rate of interest for students taking out loans from September 2012.

Those with incomes above the income threshold and paying-off loans taken out before 2012 (known as plan 1) will, for the current year (1 September 2017 – 31 August 2018), pay a rate equal to the retail price index (3.1%) -but subject to a low interest cap- which means that they will actually only pay 1.25%

For those who took out loans after the new system was introduced in 2012 (plan 2), interest accrues at a variable rate over the life of the loan dependent upon their level of income:  while studying the interest rate added is RPI + 3%, when a student graduates however, and is earning under the income threshold the interest rate falls to RPI  and when a student is earning over the threshold the interest rate starts at RPI and rises gradually back up to RPI + 3% only when a graduate is earning over £41,000 per year.

The intention of the scheme is to make repayments more progressive so that graduates earning more would repay more. The amount of interest charged therefore depends on the circumstances of the student, which is much fairer.

What we should not return to, is a system where opportunities are fewer, and where 18-year -olds who don’t go to university end up paying higher taxes to pay for the courses of the lucky few who do get a place at university.

 

That said, students do need to be much more forceful in demanding value for their money. An undergraduate complained to me recently that an effective lecturer and tutor on her course had been replaced by a dreadful one, I enquired as to what the students on the course had done about it collectively or individually, the answer was ‘nothing’. Well, nothing will come of nothing: They need to agitate about teaching standards.

I’ve had a worried correspondence about Universal Credit. This has not been informed by experience: the benefit has not yet been implemented in the New Forest; rather, it is based on the hysterical ‘shroud waving’ of politicians and commentators.

Many of my correspondents ask for implementation to be paused until problems are ironed out. This is unnecessary because we learnt from the experience of Working Tax Credit which was introduced as a ‘big bang’ in 2003 -with truly disastrous consequences. For this reason the roll-out of Universal Credit is deliberately very slow. It will not be complete until 2022 and currently only 10% of eligible claimants are on it. The process is designed to identify and remedy difficulties as the implementation proceeds.

Universal Credit replaces 6 benefits, each of which have their own problems and disadvantages. To compare Universal Credit with some previous ideal state is ridiculous. No benefit can be perfect and without anomaly. A benefit has to address the needs of the community as a whole, by encouraging claimants to seek work, and also be effective in the very diverse circumstances of individual claimants who have different attitudes and needs.

Universal Credit addresses many of the limitations of the ‘legacy’ benefits that it replaces.
It removes the discouragement to work more than 16 hours per week that is built into Jobseeker’s Allowance.
It removes the cruel choice between financial support and work which is a feature of Employment Support Allowance  -when most claimants really need a bit of both.
It addresses the disadvantage of Working Tax Credit where, once claimants are in work, there is a disincentive to increase their working hours because they lose 70 pence of every additional £1 that they earn.

The results speak for themselves: Claimants on Universal Credit find work quicker and remain in work longer.

The principal complaint has been that there is six week wait and that people are left to go hungry and their rent arrears to build up. This is just not true: Claimants can get an advance that very same day if necessary.

Most benefits have ‘waiting days’ before which the benefit does not start to accrue. This is to discourage very short term claims when people are between jobs. There were six waiting days for Universal Credit but the Chancellor has now abolished them in his budget last week.
There is a calendar month in which the evidence of the claimant’s circumstances is collected and the amount to which they are entitled is calculated. Then, there can be up to a further week for the payment to reach the claimant’s bank account.

Remember, the purpose of the benefit is to prepare claimants for the world of work: and three quarters of workers are paid monthly in arrears. So, encouraging claimants to budget over a similar period is a good discipline.

For those claimants who need money right away, a same day interest free advance can be had. This was repayable over 6 months, but the Chancellor has now extended it to a full year.

As for the allegation that rent arrears are building up as a consequence of Universal Credit, actually the reverse is true: many claimants arrive with rent arrears and, after four months on Universal Credit, these have on average fallen by a third.

Nothing is ever as bad as reported.

Last week we had the first two days of the marathon committee stage of the EU withdrawal Bill, at times it was more than lively, and at others a combination of unrelieved tedium and viciousness. We still have the best part of the 100 hours or so of scrutiny to go.

 

It is important to remember what the purpose of the bill is, because that purpose occupied little of the debating time.
Its purpose is to provide predictability, continuity and certainty to businesses, Government and individuals by ensuring that our domestic law is the same the day after we leave the EU as it as it will be on the day before we leave.

What has happened however, is that the bill has been hijacked by MPs who want to use it as a vehicle to wrest control of the negotiations with the EU from the Government, and to have Parliament dictate the terms of any agreement itself.

On the face of it this is a not unreasonable thing to demand in a democracy. After all, Parliament is the elected, representative and sovereign body, and the Government is accountable to it.

The problem with this is twofold. First, the one thing Parliament is least fitted for is negotiating a treaty.  Binding the hands of the Government in public debate in terms of the sort of agreement that it demands will leave the Government’s position completely exposed and at a huge disadvantage in negotiations with the Commission: If you play high stakes poker you need to conceal your hand, as the EU is doing.

 

Second, the demand to legislate on the terms and process, and indeed the outcome of the negotiations –which is the thrust of the amendments- is a demand to put off Brexit indefinitely until Parliament gets what it wants, even if that isn’t available. This became explicit during the debate: They will use the provisions with which they seek to amend the bill, in order to prevent Brexit if they do not like the agreement that the Government reaches. They want a veto and they were clear that this means delaying Brexit indefinitely. It is for exactly this reason that they do not want a leaving date in the legislation.

 

(This strategy is an invitation to the EU to offer less eligible terms, given that the 27 are still canvassing for us to change our minds about the whole thing.)

 

As far as possible they try and maintain the fiction that they have accepted the will of the people expressed in the referendum result and that their only purpose is to improve the terms on which we will depart. But the mask slips: sometimes quite explicitly in what is said; sometimes in extravagant applause for an unreconstructed ‘remain’ speech.

Their real strategy is to delay the whole process long enough for the public to lose interest or, as they desperately hope, until it changes its mind.

So it comes down to this: do they have the numbers to wreck the Bill?

The answer:
It’s still too soon to tell.

 

I receive dozens of invitations every week asking me to attend meetings at Westminster in order to be informed or lobbied about any number of issues. Virtually all of them clash with times at which the House of Commons is sitting.

I attend as many as I can, particularly if they are ‘drop-in’ events where you can arrive, receive an individual briefing, and leave.

What I increasingly refuse to do however, is attend ‘receptions’ for a briefing. The House of Commons now charges the commercial rates for its refreshment services in this prestigious and sort-after location.  Even 5 years ago I invited a dozen or so Normandy Veterans to tea. The Commons wanted £500 for a very small dining room; £25 per head for the tea, plus £5 per head because it was a Friday. In the event, my secretaries and I made the tea and served it elsewhere in the Palace of Westminster.

Paying a corporate entertainment rate is fine if you are a wealthy corporation. What is worrying however, is that so many charities are paying these rates to entertain MPs. The way charities go about it is to get their supporters to email their MP asking them to attend the reception.   Now, I’ve done enough fund raising and rattling the collection tin to be nervous about using those funds to enable MPs to quaff wine and canapés at the expense of those who were generous enough to put their hands in their pockets and make a donation. Did they really expect their donations to be spent in this way?

When I politely decline these invitations and explain that I am happy to receive a briefing, but without putting the charity to such expense, I have been surprised by the dusty response that follows. Constituents have replied saying that I don’t care enough about the issue that the charity seeks to highlight. On the contrary, I care enough to want them to spend their money more wisely.

Often the charities are medical ones, and allied to an ‘All Party Group’ of MPs and peers. It seems to me that there is such an all party group for every disease and condition known to man, perhaps with the exception of rigor mortis.
Essentially these groups exist to raise the profile of the disease so that greater priority is attached to it. For my part, I believe that the decisions about medical priority should be made by clinicians rather than politicians:  all this lobbying is being targeted at the wrong people; Complaints about the priority attached to a particular disease, its diagnosis and its treatment ought properly to be taken up with the medical profession.

 

For the trains that are running consult the SWR website at the following link:

https://www.southwesternrailway.com/plan-my-journey/rmt-strike

 

For us in the New Forest this strike is doubly frustrating because our train service is not in dispute. Our services will be unchanged with the guard continuing to open the doors.

It is the new trains that will come into service for the suburban lines that are the cause of the dispute. SWR has given assurances that guards will continue to be rostered for every one of these trains but that the driver will operate the doors whilst the guard in involved with other safety and ‘customer-facing’ services.

When I met senior executives of SWR last week I urged them to give way and let the guards operate the doors. After all, they have accepted that each train will still have two members of staff. So, is it worth a strike, just over which one of them operates the doors?

I pointed out that on our own London to Weymouth service the guard is quite capable of doing both the ‘customer-facing’ duties and operating the doors.

They responded by pointing out that on the suburban services there is much more opening and closing of doors, with shorter gaps. They insisted that it would be quicker and more efficient to let the driver do it, after all that’s the way the new trains were designed to be operated. They were absolutely clear that there was no need for the strike, given their willingness to continue to negotiate and the pledges they have made on jobs, and I certainly agree with that.

 

 

Of course,  we used to open and close the doors ourselves!

Earlier this year I was asked if I would to be interviewed by BBC Radio 4’s deputy political editor John Pinar on his weekly Radio 5 live programme. After discovering that I would be given the name of a female politician and have to respond with one of three reactions: “snog, marry, or avoid”. I explained that it really wasn’t my cup of tea and declined the opportunity. I forgot all about it until last week, listening to John Pinar and other journalists relishing every detail of the Westminster ‘sexgate’ scandal.

When Geoff Hoon was appointed Secretary of State for Defence he used a debate to announce an increase in the number of roles within the armed forces which would now be open to females. I welcomed it, but suggested he might even have gone further.  I pointed out however, that there was an administrative overhead that would need to be paid, in order to maintain discipline and morale. I quoted St Bernard of Clairvaux “to be always with a woman and not to have intercourse, is more difficult than to raise the dead.”
This provoked a furore: I was universally condemned. There was even an early day motion denouncing me.
I confess to having felt rather smug subsequently, when the papers were full of reports of courts martial cases concerning improper relationships.
The point I made about the forces, with St Bernard’s help, applies equally to Westminster: you need administrative arrangements and rules so that people know exactly where they stand and what standards are required of them.

The current ‘feeding frenzy’ of allegations where the most minor risqué remark is reported in the same breath as a very serious criminal offence is just absurd. It is just about as proportionate a reaction as the Junior Anti Sex League in George Orwell’s 1984.

As, I tweeted last week, I recall my housemaster’s advice when he reminded us of the rule that no boy be alone with a girl in his study “believe me boys, this is for your own safety”. I suspect that a number of parliamentary colleagues wish that they had had that advice, and taken it.

So, had I answered John Pinar’s question, whoever he might have offered me, without doubt: ‘Avoid’

 

I refer to those who demand that the Government resile from the PM’s statement that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’, and that it rules out the possibility of leaving the EU without a deal.

No matter how much you might desperately want a deal in a negotiation , to say that you rule out the possibility of leaving without a deal, is to completely undermine whatever strength your negotiating position had. It announces to your negotiating counterparties that you will accept any deal no matter how bad, and they can adjust their demands accordingly.
It is a stupid negotiating strategy.
So why are clever politicians urging the Government to adopt it?

The same clever politicians have put their names to an amendment to the Withdrawal Bill which requires that Parliament be given the power to reject the deal that the Government has negotiated. This would give Parliament the power to ensure that there is no deal.
So, they demand that the Government rule out the possibility of no deal, but they demand that Parliament has the power to ensure that there is no deal.
This is truly bizarre.

There are three possibilities: perhaps they are not nearly so clever as was thought;
maybe they are just being awkward for the sake of it;
or perhaps some of them really want as bad a deal as can possibly be had, in the desperate hope that the British people will lose their nerve and demand to stay in the EU.
After all, senior EU politicians keep reminding us that we can still change our minds.
There are all sorts of campaigns running to try and persuade us to do so, including the ‘Grab Your Granny For Europe Campaign’ which seeks to get young voters to persuade their grandparents to change their minds about leaving the EU.
Add to this mix the way that broadcast media present every piece of economic news as part of a gathering Brexit catastrophe, and you realise that ‘project fear’ is still very much alive.

Did I ever expect them just to accept the referendum result and get on with it?
No I didn’t.
European elites have a record of ignoring referendums. The Irish rejected two treaties in referendums and on both occasions were bullied into voting a second time to secure the desired result. The same happened to Denmark with the Maastricht treaty. The French and the Dutch rejected the European Constitution (in Holland by a staggering 68% to 32%) yet all its provisions became the Lisbon Treaty.

I am confident that we British are made of sterner stuff and will not allow our democracy to be stolen from us.

The ideal of the family doctor is fixed in our minds by folklore, be it Dr Kenneth in Wuthering Heights or Dr Cameron and Doctor Finlay in Doctor Finlay’s Casebook.

However it may have changed, and now more commonly referred to as general practitioners (GPs), the institution remains One of the great strengths of the NHS. Overwhelmingly they remain private contractors who provide their services to the NHS. Strangely enough, when the wartime coalition government was making plans to set up the NHS, it envisaged nationalising the GPs (by making them paid NHS employees rather than private contractors) and leaving hospitals as the independent bodies that they then were. When the post war legislation was introduced however, they did it the other way round, by nationalising the hospitals and leaving GPs as private contractors.

 

When people write to me demanding an end to all privitisation in the NHS and requiring all services to be exclusively provided by the state, I reply by asking if they really want their GP to be nationalised?

 

The GP is the gate-keeper to other NHS services. Before your GP even begins an examination of the ailment that has brought you to the surgery, she -or he- starts will all sorts of knowledge about you, your family, and your medical history. So, she is ideally placed to decide how serious your condition is and whether you need to be referred to a specialist.

 

The problem is that this strength has been eroded over the last few decades as more of the NHS resources have been invested in hospitals at the expense of general practice. Too many GPs are leaving the profession at a time when rising patient numbers, and the complex needs of an aging population, mean that the demands for their services are growing exponentially. There is however, a plan to address the problem:

• More funding –an extra £2.4 billion annually for general practice to increase to over £12 billion a year by 2020/21 (a 14% increase in real terms). Last year the first £507 million of this growth was delivered.
• Providing a new affordable professional indemnity system for GPs and their staff against clinical negligence risks
• Increasing recruitment – record numbers of medical graduates are choosing general practice and the supply of medical students is being increased by a record 25% – 1,500 more medical school places every year, focussed on producing family doctors.

Last month, the Care Quality Commission gave a positive verdict on the state of General Practice in England: Nearly 90% of practices received ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ ratings, whilst of the rest with lower ratings, the overwhelming majority of them are improving.

There is however, something more that needs to be done. Only a quarter of GPs have had any formal training in mental health, of those that have, it has been in psychiatry of an advanced sort that is well beyond the more commonplace conditions that are now presenting in terms of anxiety and depression. Addressing this omission, I believe, should be a matter of urgency.

Students from less advantaged backgrounds are going to university in greater numbers than ever before.

Our Universities are thriving and are right up at the top of the world rankings. Their alliances with business and with the technological advances of the third industrial revolution are vital to our economic prosperity as a nation. In all this the income from tuition fees has had a transformative effect. Without that fee income I just do not believe that government would make good the lost revenue, with all the other pressing demands on the public finances.
Important scientific research and innovation would be less well funded, and the opportunities for students to go to university would diminish.

 

Scotland is an object lesson: Scottish students pay no tuition fees. As a consequence universities like St Andrews limit the number of Scottish students to a mere 20% of total, and in their own country, but you can hardly blame the universities for preferring students that pay the fees.

 

When we were devising the current system of student finance back in 2010. We sought to gain the advantages of a graduate tax with without the disadvantages.
Our system is progressive: wealthier graduates pay more; the income threshold at which you start to repay will shortly be raised from £21,000 to £25,000. Also, any outstanding balance is written-off after 30 years. This writing-off of significant balances was a deliberately designed feature of the system, in order to reduce the costs paid by less well-off graduates.
The disadvantage of a graduate tax is that many graduates that achieve high levels of income would end up paying more than the cost of their degrees, and this is avoided under our arrangements.

I believe that I would have no difficulty persuading a student about to begin an engineering degree at –say, Imperial College London, that if it ended up costing him £50,000, he’d be getting a bargain and should have no doubt that it would result in higher levels of income, rewarding him for the investment that he had made.
I know that I could not make the same case for all courses at all institutions: many students are not getting the same value for money, but they are all paying the same amount.

 

The disappointing part of our reform was that it was supposed to create a demand-led market in higher education, but it hasn’t. Amongst other innovations we expected shorter degree courses to be offered to students who wanted them. We expected universities to charge different fees depending both on reputation and what was actually on offer.

Unfortunately, the imposition of a maximum fee of £9,000 per year has had the perverse effect of almost all universities charging exactly the same, and without the incentive to compete and innovate.

 

The Government, I believe, has just made exactly the same mistake with its proposal for a maximum charge for electricity. I fear that all the electricity companies will end up charging the maximum just in the way that universities have.

 

 It is competition that drives prices down and innovation up, not government controls. The job of government is to promote competition by ending restrictive practices. Trying to fix prices has rarely, if ever, worked.

 

I bumped into Grant Shapps at the Conservative Conference in Manchester and we exchanged pleasantries -we were after all ministerial colleagues in the same department, and I was always in awe of his intellect, his sheer determination and energy. He didn’t give the slightest hint of the ‘plot’ which has subsequently emerged. Perhaps he realised that I would not be remotest of prospects (or perhaps he just thought me now of too little consequence). In any event, he has now been ‘outed’ in a Machiavellian master-stroke by the government whips. I know how dreadful it is being at the centre of a media feeding frenzy, so I do not envy him, but hey, he had it coming.

Understandably. I have had a huge correspondence about splits and leadership challenges. I share my correspondents’ frustration, but not their evident surprise: I cannot recall when it was not so.

I was David Cameron’s parliamentary secretary for 8 years, both as leader of the opposition and Prime Minister. I cannot remember when there wasn’t plotting. I did the same job for Michael Howard, and I was in the Whips office during Ian Duncan-Smiths turbulent leadership: The battle was continuous. John Major fought a long guerrilla war with elements of the Parliamentary party. No less so, did Maggie. Even Churchill had to endure continuous sniping from his own side. The Other parties are no different. Blair spoke of the scars on his back, and Jeremy Corbyn had the most turbulent contests up until the June election.

Our electoral system ensures that our political parties have to be broad churches of generally like-minded people who, nevertheless will be bound to disagree on important issues affecting the future of our country. This should not surprise us but, add to that mix the large egos disproportionately possessed by politicians, and the short attention span of our journalism which has a tendency to see everything through the prism of ‘personalities’, and it is little wonder that the headlines scream.

Of the inundation of emails, not one has urged me to use my influence dispose of the current PM. They have all supported her. I believe they are right to do so because the challenge that we face as a nation is one of policy not personality. There are two key issues to be addressed:
First, to negotiate BREXIT on advantageous terms.
Second, to maintain financial stability whilst at the same time addressing the proper public demand to improve the housing situation, productivity and stagnant wages, care for the elderly, growing student debt, and… I could go on.

None of these priorities would be advanced by the distraction of a leadership election. If there were a candidate who so obviously were going to make a better fist of it than the current PM then one might understand the motive, but there isn’t.

This is a time to hold our nerve, to knuckle down, and get on with the job.