Fair Fees campaign, headed by Ruth Davidson, launches to fight for a fairer student finance system

A new campaign, Fair Fees, has launched today (8th June) to support graduates, students and parents who believe the student finance system is unfair, unsustainable and needs reform. 

The Fair Fees campaign is calling on the Chancellor and the government to commit to reforming the system and has launched a petition which will be delivered to Downing Street. 

There are roughly 5.8 million students who started university between 2012-2023 and are on the Plan 2 scheme. They find themselves caught in a system that charges them far more than other students for their education. 

Current students face up to 40 years of repayments, and for most graduates, monthly deductions are not covering monthly interest with their debt continuing to rise. A graduate earning £50k can face an effective combined marginal rate of 51%. Interest currently sits on a sliding scale from RPI to plus 3% and is considered a discredited measure of inflation. It is not used to uprate state benefits but still used to charge graduates. 

The campaign also has a loan repayment calculator that can provide an estimate on repayments, interest and the amount by which the debt balance could increase. 

Ruth Davidson said: “A whole generation of young people who did all the right things - studying hard, gaining their degree and entering the workforce -  are being punished with charges far more than the amounts they borrowed. The loans they were sold  are now operating as a tax on aspiration. Many will be shackled with eye-watering debts for decades under a system so discredited the government refuses to use it to uprate other payments. It is a national scandal.

A fair system should not trap people in decades of repayments while their balances grow. It should set interest at a reasonable level, protect students from retrospective rule changes and make sure the cost of higher education is shared fairly between graduates and the wider country.

It is not the job of this campaign to write the Treasury's policy, but any fair settlement should meet a few basic tests. It should:

• work like a loan that can realistically be repaid, not a tax in all but name

• reward work, so that middle earners are not left worse off the harder they try

• share the cost of higher education fairly between graduates and the country that benefits from them

• keep faith with the terms people signed up to, so the rules cannot be rewritten after the event

• give the next generation something better than a longer version of the same problem

If you think the system needs reform then I urge you to support this campaign.