Murnaghan 29.01.12 Interview with David Willetts MP, Universities Minister

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: New figures out tomorrow are expected to show around a 10% drop in applications from students applying to start university this autumn. Last year the government increased tuition fees raising the upper cap to around £9000 a year. In a moment I’ll be speaking to the University’s Minister, David Willetts but just let me alert you to our Twitter commentators today. They are James Kirkup, deputy political editor for the Daily Telegraph, Craig Woodhouse, political correspondent with the London Evening Standard and the Times political correspondent, Anushka Asthana. They’ll be providing their reactions via Twitter which you can read on the side panels and you can follow on our website, skynews.com/politics, you can join in of course as well, just use the hashtag #murnaghan. Well let’s say a very good morning to Mr Willetts and these figures, still not firmed up but they do seem to show quite a substantial drop in university applications. Is that what you’ve seen at your department?

DAVID WILLETTS: Well UCAS will be releasing the figures officially tomorrow and obviously I can’t pre-empt their announcement. What we do know from the trend that has already been established by the provisional figures though is it looks as if amongst the crucial group of young people just leaving school and college, it looks there as if applications are pretty healthy. It looks as if there they have been maintaining roughly on the kind of levels we have been expecting, once you allow for the fact that the number of kids in that age group is falling. So amongst young people the trend that we’ve already seen is for applications to remain at a very high level. The provision evidence so far has been if anything the problem is with more mature students and for them …

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: What kind of drop there then?

DAVID WILLETTS: Well I don’t want to get into figures because we have the official figures tomorrow but from the provisional figures we have already seen that there they may be drop and it looks as if for them of course, these are people who work, they may be thinking that now isn’t a good time to take leave from their work …

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: And trying to develop new skills, I mean that’s a worry for government policy is it not?

DAVID WILLETTS: I want to see people having the opportunity of going to university which is why of course we made it absolutely clear that nobody has to pay up front to go to university, you only pay back when you’re a graduate and actually we are for the first time extending loans to part time students so the other possibility with these mature people is that they may be thinking instead of staying in work and studying part time, now they’ll get this extra help from the coalition.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: But overall a drop from UK admissions, overall a drop so therefore it looks like your policy, the increase in tuition fees, is putting them off.

DAVID WILLETTS: Well it looks as if young people aren’t being put off. It looks as if the crucial group, and we made a great effort to ...

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: So you don’t care about the mature students?

DAVID WILLETTS: Well a lot of the debate in the past year has been whether young people leaving school and college would think they had to pay for university and so wouldn’t go. I think we have succeeded through a real effort, we have had young people recently graduated going to just about every school and college saying you don’t pay up front, you only pay back if you are earning more than £21,000, it’s still great to go to university and all the figures we have seen so far, we haven’t got the official ones until tomorrow but all the figures we’ve seen so far suggest to me that amongst the crucial group of young people, we’ve still got high levels of people applying to university.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: You’ve been banging the drum abroad haven’t you, you and others, trying to make up the shortfall with non EU students. You’ve got to show quite a big rise in those applications, and I know you personally have been to places like Brazil saying come on in to the UK, come and study here and pay us your fees.

DAVID WILLETTS: When you say make up the shortfall, I don't think it’s that big a deal, you slipped that in. There isn’t a shortfall to make up and actually …

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: There is a shortfall, you’ve admitted that there is going to be some kind of drop in UK university admissions for this coming term.

DAVID WILLETTS: It looks so far from the figures that we’ll see tomorrow that, as I say, young people are still …

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: We’ve been over that but then non-EU citizens are filling in those places.

DAVID WILLETTS: But Dermot I suspect that this August you’ll be summoning me to this studio to explain how there are people with good qualification who haven’t got a place at university. We’re still going to have in Britain more people applying than there are places, it’s a competitive process so there isn’t a shortfall, there aren’t universities with empty places on their site. For British and EU students there is intense competition. There is, completely separately, access from non-EU students from overseas, they don’t take places from British students but yes, I want to see well qualified students coming to legitimate colleges and universities in Britain and I do want to see that kind of overseas maintained because this is a great ….

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Maintained or increased? How many more are we going to see of that kind of student?

DAVID WILLETTS: Well it varies from country to country but it looks as if fortunately, people around the world still recognise the value of coming to study at a British university, it’s a great opportunity for Britain to maintain their influence in the world and it’s also a great export industry but they can come here to study, provided that they are legitimate students coming to a legitimate university.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Can I just ask you on another matter, university related, you are dropping then the idea then of private universities being set up? There have been articles saying that the legislation is going to exclude that clause.

DAVID WILLETTS: I’ve read some of that speculation. What’s happening, Dermot, is across the government there are so many ministers with great ideas for sorting out the mess we inherited from Labour that it may be the case that not every bill that every minister wants to bring in in the next session is necessarily going to have time in the next session. We’ll just have to see how that plays out but the government is committed to reforming universities and that includes a wider choice for young people. It’s not ideology, it’s just saying the money should go to the universities that the young person wants to go to to get the best education for them.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay, a couple of other questions, what are you going to do about Steven Hester? A real headache for a government that talks about fairness, that kind of bonus and it comes out today that he has got these long-term incentive plans that will give him tens of millions of pounds.

DAVID WILLETTS: Well those incentive plans of course were set up by the previous government when he was brought in to sort out a mess that began under the previous government so there’s no legal basis for any change in the contractual arrangements. We’ve made it clear we don’t want any cash bonuses exceeding £2000 in the banks where the taxpayer has a stake and of course Vince Cable made a very important announcement earlier this week about how in the future we want to tighten the regime but we have no legal powers now and of course it would be therefore very much a personal decision for him as to what he does.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: So only moral pressure. Does that go out though to all companies, is that the prevailing mood? Talking to Deborah Hargreaves from the Low Pay Commission, she says that’s exactly what people want to see, they don’t want to see anyone paid more than a million pounds a year.

DAVID WILLETTS: I think what we are proposing is greater transparency, so that you can see how much pay there is in a simple way rather than hidden in all the footnotes. We want to see a much wider range of people on the remuneration committees, we are looking at whether you can have greater power for stakeholders, shareholders to vote on this but also companies are part of this culture, they are part of this community, they benefit from being in Britain, we educate people that they draw on and so I think they will also think of their moral responsibility in a way that David Cameron expected us as Ministers to do, that’s why he asked us all to take a pay cut, quite rightly.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: The other side of the coin, and we are running out of time, are things like the benefit cuts, this is why people feel this. Look at the money that people are earning at the top and this is a government talking about an overall cap on benefits of £26,000 a year and I’m going to be discussing that with Liam Byrne in just a moment or two, Labour helped defeat that in the House of Lords, certain amendments in the House of Lords. They are going to put forward this idea of regional variations in benefits, is that something you could address?

DAVID WILLETTS: Well I think Labour have copped out on all this and I think they have lost contact with their own members because in my own experience there are a lot of people out there struggling to make ends meet on pay below £26,000 who will be shocked that Labour have not backed our proposals. More widely, there is an interesting debate to be had about regional pay and perhaps Labour are now supporting some of the thinking that is now going on about whether there should be greater pay flexibility across the public sector, perhaps you could ask the Labour spokesman.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: We are just about to be doing that but also then on benefits, you mentioned pay there, we have heard that from the Chancellor in the past, but what about benefits?

DAVID WILLETTS: What we are talking about here is a clear fixed £26,000 cap, that is the decision before parliament, it was an opportunity for Labour to show they understood the need for welfare reform – they shirked it yet again.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay Mr Willetts, thank you very much indeed, David Willetts there.

DAVID WILLETTS: Thank you.