How is future university expansion to be paid for? This issue poses a real challenge to your political judgment.  For on the one hand, it must be common ground that graduates benefit enormously, personally and financially, from their education - and may reasonably be asked to make a higher personal contribution.  On the other hand, it is quite clear that the funding system has a direct effect upon the motivation of would-bet students.  The evidence suggests that levels of student anxiety are stress are already high and rising, and that to increase the burden of private fees would both increase those anxiety levels and deter many more students from furthering their education.  Where does the weight of the argument therefore lie?  There are signs this week that Gordon Brown may be entering the lists, with the intention of making this a second landmark of his own leadership challenge to Blair, the first having been his opposition to Foundation Hospitals Mk I.

I am opposed to the present private fee-system, and wish to see it replaced entirely by mainstream public funding.  The present fee-system already collects over £2bn pa from students, and that should be gradually unwound.  I do not wish to see our universities go down the market route of the US system.  I do not think that university education should be institutionalised as a priced "market system" of any kind. Subject to the option of corporate fund-raising (which should not be prohibited), the entire income of our public universities should be derived from public sources, and the general tax-base should be strengthened by a graduate tax, without hypothecation. That should not of course preclude the right of citizens to establish independent universities ooutside the State system, like Buckingham, or the private school sector. 

As a matter of principle, future Governments should seek to reduce the levels of contribution made by parents to the cost of their children's education.  These are bad for parents, bad for the economy, and bad for intergenerational relationships. Mine are socialist propositions, intervening in the market to secure the more effective redistribution of wealth and advantage, seeking to do justice as between citizens of differing abilities, as between parents and children, as between each individual student and the ambient society.

This new taxation should not be retrospective, as a matter of general principle.  To impose a levy upon middle-aged graduates who had planned their lives without knowledge of such a tax would be unjust.  The liability should be configured as an Income Tax premium, a percentage up-lift upon the graduate's combined annual Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax and National Insurance tax bill as otherwise computed. The total annual tax liability would be increased by a percentage determined by Parliament.  This percentage would be the Graduate Premium.

The Graduate Premium would not relate to any particular feature of the graduate's education or training - subject studied, University, profession followed.  Liability to pay would be triggered by the receipt of a concluding qualification, or equivalent.  A drop-out student would not be required to pay the Graduate Premium., even though there may have been some de facto benefit from the partial completion of a course (e.g. in languages, mathematics, music)  Liability to the Graduate Premium would be arise for all those who reached the age of 16 (i.e. the school-leaving age) after the implementation-date for the legislation.  The income threshold for payment would be the National Average Wage: for any year in which the graduate's personal income exceeded that National Average, the premium percentage would be payable upon his entire combined tax bill - although it might be necessary to taper liability by way of a stepped introduction.  In any year in which the graduate's income fell below the National Average, no premium would be payable, and no premium could be recovered retrospectively in respect of that year.  And each year's assessment would stand as a separate liability, without generating any presumption of liability for ensuing years.

My preference would be to avoid hypothecation, because it would generate the misleading idea that a Government's obligations to tertiary education were in some way limited to the proceeds of the Graduate Premium.  That would be, however, a matter for further debate.

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