Ian Sollom
MP for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire · Liberal Democrat · United Kingdom
“Research is worse: universities now recover only two thirds of research costs. According to the Russell Group, universities put in £6.3 billion of their own money into research last year. For many years now, the funding gap has been filled by international students, but that income is now also falling away.”
House of Commons28 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Later today the Chancellor delivers his first Budget; every signal is that universities should expect very little from it. We cannot continue to ignore the stark choice before us when it comes to university policy.”
House of Commons28 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“A lot of the interventions that I have suggested on the university side are cost-neutral and would involve restructuring. I have three questions for the Minister.”
House of Commons28 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Discussing potential rescues behind closed doors gives us all the moral hazard and none of the transparency. Liberal Democrats see universities as essential national infrastructure, not cost centres to be squeezed.”
House of Commons28 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) on securing this debate. Sheffield is an excellent place to ground this debate because it has two great examples of the origin stories of many of our universities.”
House of Commons28 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Committee recommended a special administration regime so that a failing university could keep teaching while its future was resolved, but the Government have said that they are “not currently persuaded” because legislating would be too complex. I would say that that is an argument for starting now, not for doing nothing.”
House of Commons28 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
The complete record
496 held · 484 searchable for Ian Sollom. The searchable lines are below in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 3 of 10.
This is not an official version of UK Parliament proceedings. It reproduces the published record and links to it; the official version is the one UK Parliament publishes.
“Yet the Bill’s general approach is to remove independent scrutiny rather than improve it. I am not arguing that all the bodies that have been created—Healthwatch, the National Guardian’s Office, which has been absorbed into NHS England, which will now be abolished, and HSSIB—have worked exactly as intended. In fact, I have been working with families and others affected by failings at Cambridge University Hospitals trust. It has been suggested that the trust has not published independent information, commissioned by the trust, that found 32 missed opportunities to identify and address concerns about a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon between 2012 and 2024, and children were harmed as a result.”
House of Commons1 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Reducing duplication, streamlining priorities, and getting resources close to frontline care—these are reasonable aims. My concern is that in pursuing simplification the Bill makes a series of choices on patient safety that it is not clear have been fully thought through and that risk repeating mistakes that this country has paid a very high price to learn from. Through successive inquiries, including Mid Staffordshire, Morecambe Bay, Shrewsbury, Ian Paterson—I could name more—Parliament has repeatedly recognised that the NHS cannot be relied on to scrutinise itself. Each found the same pattern: concerns present within the system but not acted on, problems developing in isolated services, and a culture in which those who raised concerns were treated as the difficulty rather than as sources of vital information.”
House of Commons1 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That would represent a return to conditions that so many of the inquiries warned us about, and I think that patients would rightly question whether lessons have really been learned. As the Bill proceeds to Committee stage, I urge the Government to ask a simple question about each body that it proposes to absorb or scrap: not just whether the function will still be performed somewhere but whether it will be performed with genuine independence from the organisations that it scrutinises. That independence has been hard-won, and I hope that Ministers will reflect on that carefully before legislating to remove it.”
House of Commons1 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The CQC and HSSIB themselves have expressed concerns about how those two organisations might be brought together. The AAIB is separate from the Civil Aviation Authority, and that model was created for a good reason. The hon. Member made good points about the statistics on that earlier. Returning to the case I was talking about, a clinician at the trust who did raise concerns formally in 2015 was simultaneously subjected to disciplinary proceedings and told by the trust that they did not want to hear any more complaints. I wish I could say that I had not heard similar stories from NHS staff several times in a little under two years as an MP. Just because there are some flaws in those independent systems for the NHS, it is not a reason to remove the independence.”
House of Commons1 June 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It comes with a democratic obligation to account for his reasoning to this House and to the people we represent—not to describe outcomes or to catalogue process, but to explain his judgment. What did the Prime Minister weigh up, what did he conclude and where in his reasoning did he think he went wrong? Yesterday the Prime Minister told us 12 times that he made an error of judgment, but he has not told us once what that error actually was. We still do not know how he crashed that car, and this House demands an answer.”
House of Commons21 April 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It was not an account of a judgment. This morning, Sir Olly Robbins told the Foreign Affairs Committee that No. 10 showed no interest in whether Mandelson would receive clearance, only when, that there was, in his words, a “generally dismissive attitude” to Mandelson’s vetting, with focus only on getting him to Washington “quickly”. This is not a picture of a Prime Minister kept in the dark by officials. The alibi, it turns out, has witnesses, and they are not saying what the Prime Minister told us yesterday. The Prime Minister has wide Executive latitude. He is entitled to make difficult appointments and to weigh competing considerations and reach conclusions that others would not reach. That is what governing requires. But the latitude is not unconditional.”
House of Commons21 April 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“He has confirmed that he knew its contents, but he proceeded anyway. That was his judgment, and it is that judgment—not the vetting process, not the Foreign Office chain of command, not Sir Olly Robbins—that this House has not been given an account of. Instead, yesterday we received a detailed, exhaustive account of what officials failed to tell him. Yet the more exhaustive the catalogue of official failures becomes, the more completely the Prime Minister’s own reasoning disappears from view. He cannot simultaneously claim an error of judgment and outsource its explanation to official failure. He has offered us an alibi instead of an explanation, an account that places him away from the scene of the crash. Yesterday’s statement was a masterclass in process—process that the Prime Minister was apparently unaware of.”
House of Commons21 April 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It matters for understanding what went wrong, for preventing it from happening again and for judging whether the driver should still be behind the wheel. The difference is not a technicality; it is the difference between meaningful accountability and accountability that is merely performative, between a Prime Minister who owns his decisions and one who merely acknowledges them. Accountability to this House is not a constitutional nicety; it is the condition on which this House and the people we all represent grant the Government the authority to act at all. We all know what was in the due diligence report that the Prime Minister received in December 2024: the twice-resigned Minister, the China and Russia connections, and the Epstein association that continued after conviction. The Prime Minister received that report.”
House of Commons21 April 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Yesterday the Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box for nearly 2.5 hours and said on at least 12 occasions that appointing Mandelson was an “error of judgment”—his judgment. He apologised and said that he took responsibility for it, but at no point—not once in that 2.5 hours—did he tell the House what his error of judgment was or exactly where he went wrong in his reasoning. That distinction matters. Saying, “I should not have appointed him,” is a description of an outcome; it is not an account of a judgment. It is like saying, “I should not have crashed the car,” without accounting for the actions that led to the crash, because whether the driver was speeding, distracted or asleep at the wheel, the answer matters.”
House of Commons21 April 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I, too, welcome the Minister’s statement and his commitment to updating the House regularly on this issue. However, my constituent was infected with hepatitis C in 1993 and is still yet to receive any support because of the scheme’s original cut-off date. I know that the strict cut-off dates have been relaxed, but her cohort of the infected but never compensated—and, in some cases, never registered—still seem to be at the back of the queue. That compounds the harm and the feeling that they have been shut out for so long. Can he reassure my constituent that there will be renewed urgency on that particular cohort?”
House of Commons14 April 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Following on from that, St Neots is the fastest growing town in Cambridgeshire, and our community-led festival has attracted 35,000 people in recent years, demonstrating the extraordinary cultural energy of the town. With the UK town of culture expression of interest deadline falling on 31 March, will the Leader of the House find time when we return from recess for a debate on the competition, so that Members can champion fully their towns before the spring shortlist is announced, and the Government can hear exactly why St Neots should win?”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Just this week, the BBC aired “Inside the Rage Machine”, which used whistleblower testimony and evidence to lay bare how social media giants such as Meta and TikTok are consistently and deliberately pushing harmful content to users, after finding that their outrage fuelled engagement. All of that is to say that if the motion for this debate seemed appropriate at the beginning of this Parliament, when I first visited the IWF, it is now urgent. Every week, I hear from parents, young people and organisations who are fighting a losing battle against the proliferation of online harms because, despite its noble aims, the current legislation is falling short of what Parliament envisaged it would do.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“After the codes were implemented in mid-2025, the Mental Health Foundation published research stating that 68% of young people had experienced harmful content online. It described the harm as one of “the biggest looming threats to young people’s mental health”. In October 2025, the Molly Rose Foundation found that over a third of children reported that they had been exposed to at least one type of high-risk content in the past week. In a classroom of 30 children, that is 11 who are, every day, being shown content that promotes suicide and self-harm or that romanticises depression and eating disorders. That is the exact “primary priority content” that the UK’s flagship piece of online safety legislation explicitly promised it would protect them from.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“At the time, the Online Safety Act 2023 had been in law for nearly two years, and the protection of children codes of practice that came from it, which promised to improve user safety dramatically, had just been published and implemented. The text of those codes was heavily criticised by civil society, and even by the Children’s Commissioner, who said they would simply not be strong enough to protect children from the “multitude of harms they are exposed to online every day.” It seemed timely for a motion to be brought before the House so that we could scrutinise the Online Safety Act and its resultant codes, as they now are being used in practice, and highlight to the Government the need to take action in this Parliament to protect young people.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“During my visit, the IWF told me that, in the preceding five years alone, it had taken down more than 1 million webpages that showed at least one child sexual abuse image—often, they showed hundreds or thousands. The IWF’s annual report last year revealed that 2025 was the worst year on record for child sexual abuse material. Its analysts confirmed 312,000 reports—a 7% rise on the year before. Most starkly, in 2024 they discovered 13 AI-generated videos of child sexual abuse, but in 2025 the figure was 3,440—a rise of over 26,000%, for those who are interested in numbers. Nearly two thirds of those videos were category A material, which is the most extreme classification. A little while after my visit, I began to work with the Molly Rose Foundation on the proposal in this motion.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I beg to move, That this House believes that current legislation is falling short in preventing online harms; and calls on the Government to review whether it is necessary to introduce new legislation that is centred around harm reduction in this Parliament. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate. Not long after my election in 2024, I visited the Internet Watch Foundation in Cambridgeshire. That organisation is on the frontline of the fight against child sexual abuse material, and is one of only a handful of non-law enforcement bodies worldwide with the legal power to proactively seek out and remove online images and videos of such abuse.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There have been 12 debates with the words “online safety” in the title this Parliament and there have been hundreds of references to “online harm”, yet there has been little indication that the Government are addressing the core issues raised in this debate. I hope that Members will use this debate to raise the full range of harms we hear about in our work. I ask the Minister to respond specifically to these questions: will the Government examine whether the safe harbour principle is serving Parliament’s original intentions or has become a mechanism that platforms use to avoid accountability for harms about which they are already aware? Will the Government commit to ensuring that any new legislation this Parliament brings forward is built around harm reduction and not compliance?”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Amendments could be passed within months to introduce the robust, risk-based minimum age limits that we Liberal Democrats have been calling for. Minimum joining ages should be determined by a platform-specific assessment of age appropriateness in risk. That will incentivise the market to adopt lower-risk functionalities if platforms wish to open themselves to a wider pool of users. We could argue that a review of sorts has already taken place: every coroner’s report, every tragic story told in the Chamber and every investigation by charities and organisations make up that review. The evidence is plainly there, but the harm is being allowed to continue. We are here as Members of Parliament to scrutinise, and we have done that.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Why would they bother when it is so much more profitable to tick already loosely defined boxes? A full review of the current legislation must investigate the barriers that Ofcom says are preventing it from delivering on the intentions of Parliament. That includes the safe harbour principle, which allows platforms to claim compliance and skirt enforcement action on harms about which they are already aware, and the complete lack of any obligation in the Act that platforms take active steps to reduce the risk of harm to users. In practice, that means that a platform can follow Ofcom’s codes to the letter, even while its own risk assessment shows that it is aware of serious ongoing harm, and face no enforcement consequences.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There is a clear gap between the intention of the legislation and how it is being implemented. That is because the Online Safety Act and its codes are ultimately built around compliance and not harm reduction. Rules-based legislation means that platforms can happily meet their legal duties if measures in the codes are followed, and they are under no obligation to effectively and proactively address the harms identified in their risk assessments. Putting only a moral duty on platforms to protect young people from harm is not going to work—we have seen for years that it does not work. How can we expect the very same platforms that have been shown to deliberately and knowingly peddle harmful content to young people to essentially police themselves?”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Volume 4, section 17 says that platforms must “Ensure content recommender systems are designed and operated so that content indicated potentially to be PPC”— primary priority content, which is suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and mental health content— “is excluded from the recommender feeds of children”. Research shows that children were most likely to report having seen harmful content through feeds with recommender systems—very few actively seek it out—so the intention behind this measure seems good. But then we see that it applies only to “child-accessible” parts of a service that are “medium or high risk for one or more specific kinds of PPC”. In Ofcom’s December review, not a single social media platform rated itself high risk for suicide or self-harm content.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Not only are social media platforms under no obligation to publish their algorithms, but with AI increasingly being used to build and continually iterate these algorithms, the platforms themselves are often unaware of the exact mechanisms that shape experience. Harm is occurring as a result of an unaccountable black box. Young people are not entirely passive in this system—they know it is happening—but platform tools provide very limited control over what the algorithm continues to recommend. Looking at Ofcom’s summary of the protection of children codes of practice, we can see how a weak interpretation of the Online Safety Act is allowing such harm to be perpetuated.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The problem is that a user’s engagement with content does not always indicate their actual interest in it. Another young person from the University of Bristol study—a trans man—described feeling compelled to intervene in homophobic and transphobic comments sections, to try to support his community and challenge prejudice. He was understood by the platform to have engaged, and subsequently he was bombarded with more and more of the same hateful content. The tension between knowing that his algorithm would register his intervention as interest and wanting to actively challenge hateful views was a constant source of stress online. Problems also arise from a lack of transparency.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The word used by the coroner was that Molly was able—even encouraged by platforms—to “binge” this content. The normalisation of these recommendation mechanisms has created an awful, self-perpetuating cycle. One case study from the University of Bristol described a 17-year-old girl who was forcing herself to repeatedly watch graphic content of a gory accident on TikTok to try to desensitise herself to violence. She knew that she would be regularly exposed to this kind of content online and wanted to train herself to be able to watch it and not feel sick. We can only assume that due to her increased attention, she was shown even more of this horrific content. Recommendation systems in and of themselves are no bad thing. They create a personalised space to explore interests and sometimes do filter out content that a user has no interest in.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The shock, disgust and strong emotion inevitably caused by this content creates engagement: we watch for longer, we engage more, and the algorithm takes this as permission to show us even more of it to keep us hooked. Endless scrolling functionalities allow already vulnerable users to fall into a world where there is no escape from this cycle. Members will be aware that we Liberal Democrats have long called for platforms to implement built-in caps on social media doomscrolling. In 2017, it was concluded for the first time ever that content on social media had contributed to the death of a young person when teenager Molly Russell tragically took her own life. Before she died, she had viewed thousands of suicide and self-harm videos and images on Pinterest and Instagram, some of which were pushed to her without her asking to see them.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There are attention deficit harms caused by passive screen watching and health harms associated with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. Higher social media use has been directly linked to shorter sleep duration and difficulties with sleep onset. Gambling harm is often overlooked, but a recent Guardian investigation found that Meta AI was pointing vulnerable social media users to illegal online casinos and even suggesting ways to bypass UK gambling safeguards. Regulation is clearly not keeping pace with the evolving digital landscape. Often, it is the directly harmful, even illegal, content that is caught up in these algorithms.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I was paired with Doctor Lizzy Winstone, a researcher from the University of Bristol whose work focuses on how young people use social media and its impact on their mental health. Her most recent research investigates the algorithmic recommendation of content as one of the primary mechanisms that shapes young people’s digital mental health. She and others have found that a large part of online harm is structural, arising from not just individual bad actors, but business models designed at their very core to maximise attention and to profit from provocation. Social media is built to be addictive. Hooking users in and keeping them engaged is at the very heart of almost every platform’s business model. Algorithmic models cause harm through both overtly harmful content and content that is harmless on the face of it.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Online harm comes in three forms. First, there is harmful content: the outright illegal and the extreme, posted and peddled by bad actors across social media platforms. Then we have harmful interactions with bad actors, including grooming, cyber-bullying and extortion. I am sure that Members across the House will share many stories of the impact of both types of harm today; it is a tragedy just how many there are. I want to focus on the third form of online harm, which is the harm that arises from not just the type of content encountered online, but the intensity with which it is repeatedly pushed on to young people by the platforms themselves. This week, I was pleased to participate in the Royal Society pairing scheme.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The text of the motion asks for a review, and that is certainly what I want to see. I have not come here today to stir up panic or to imply that the wellbeing of our children, or indeed our adults, is doomed. There is hope and we should not have to accept harm as a reality of life on the internet. As the Molly Rose Foundation chief executive officer, Andy Burrows, noted this week after campaigning pushed both TikTok and Meta to row back on plans for end-to-end encryption in direct messaging, “tech firms are not immune to pressure”. However, pressure on its own is not enough. The Government must urgently look at strengthening the Online Safety Act to ensure that pressure has robust legislative backing behind it, and that Ofcom actually has the power to enforce the regulations that will protect us all from harm.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We need timely action after the consultation, because these issues are not going away, as we have heard today, so let’s keep talking about this.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward) luck with tackling antisocial behaviour. She highlighted the link between what is happening in the online space and real-world antisocial behaviour and how they reinforce each other; it is toxic. I thank the hon. Member for Reading Central (Matt Rodda) for sharing Olly Stephens’s story again. I pay tribute to Stuart and Amanda for the campaigning they do. The hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh) talked about the manosphere and highlighted the connection to the real world, but in a more positive light, asking what we can do in the real world to make a difference to the online space; I really appreciate that. The hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) also made some important interventions. I appreciate the Minister’s effort to respond directly to all Members.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank all Members who have contributed to the debate. The hon. Member for Blaydon and Consett (Liz Twist) told us about the 135 deaths linked to one pro-suicide forum—135 people who are not with us. It is really stark and powerful to share that sort of statistic. My hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) shared stories of the new frontiers in misogyny and abuse online. The hon. Member for Gravesham (Dr Sullivan) highlighted the science, as I would expect from the chair of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology—though she is maybe not quite so hot on geography. The hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton North (Mrs Blundell) made some really powerful points on online discourse and how hate, Islamophobia and antisemitism proliferate. I wish the hon.”
House of Commons19 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The proxy appears effectively to be graduate salaries. Graduate salaries are a poor measure of what society gains from a degree. Nursing, teaching, social work and creative arts all underperform on salary data while delivering enormous public value, so what logic are the Conservatives applying? Even on salary terms, cutting arts places would damage science, technology, engineering and maths, not protect it, as one Labour Member mentioned. Arts courses are relatively cheap to deliver and cross-subsidise expensive laboratory provision. The Institute for Fiscal Studies explicitly found that reducing arts funding may, perversely, reduce funding for STEM.”
House of Commons18 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We would go further by doubling degree apprenticeships in priority sectors and introducing skills co-operatives specifically to help small businesses to pool resources to take on apprentices they could not otherwise afford. However, the question is whether the motion as a whole represents a serious plan, and I am afraid that it does not. Specifically, it calls for “controlling the number of places on university courses where the benefits are significantly outweighed by the cost to graduates and taxpayers.” Let us be clear about what “controlling the number of places” means. It means cutting. The courses they have in mind are arts, humanities and creative subjects. The argument rests on a definition that sounds objective but is not: which courses have benefits that are significantly outweighed by their costs?”
House of Commons18 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am grateful to the Opposition for this debate. In the recent Westminster Hall debate on this topic, we heard powerful testimony about the reality that graduates face in making repayments every month and watching their balance grow, with their plans deferred and lives constrained. I am sure we will hear more of that today, and those stories deserve to be heard and to receive a clear response, not a political runaround. Parts of the motion are not wrong. The plan 2 threshold should be unfrozen, and while we may disagree on the specific change proposed, the interest structure does need reform, as the Liberal Democrats have said clearly. The motion also calls for more apprenticeships for 18 to 21-year-olds, and we welcome such investment in principle.”
House of Commons18 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is, as I have said before, a counsel of despair dressed up as policy. Then there are the creative industries: over £100 billion a year to the British economy; one of our most successful global exports; built on a pipeline of arts graduates. The answer is not to stop training the people on whom the whole pipeline depends. Ultimately, the value of an education cannot be read entirely from a graduate’s salary. The capacity for critical thinking, empathy and cultural participation are public goods, hidden in plain sight, that show up nowhere in write-off rates. A party that asks only “What does it pay?” has already decided something important about what it values.”
House of Commons18 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention, because that is one part of the argument I am making. There is a very important point about that, which is that it could equally be an argument for making the loan system fairer in its repayment terms to reflect that. There is a deeper problem, too. The graduate earnings premium has declined in Britain, but not because we have too many graduates; it is because we have too few skilled jobs. That is a demand-side failure and a Conservative legacy. Our peers in OECD countries have expanded graduate numbers while maintaining the graduate premium, because they built the industries and invested in the regions that generate high-skilled employment. Cutting student numbers accepts our economic underperformance as permanent.”
House of Commons18 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The system has been treated as a fiscal convenience rather than a social contract by the previous Government, and now by this one. Graduates deserve better.”
House of Commons18 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The £1,000 grant reaches about 10% of students, restricted to specific subjects. I think we can do better on maintenance policy: grants must be available regardless of subject, and the parental income thresholds that have been frozen since 2008 must be urgently uprated. Thirdly, we would establish a royal commission on graduate finance, including plans 2, 3 and 5—plans 3 and 5 have terms that are, in several respects, even harsher. All those plans should be in scope. It should also have independent oversight of key parameters. That is not to delay, but to look seriously at fairer interest structures, total repayment caps and progressive repayment rates, and, critically, to build the cross-party settlement that is the only real protection against the next Government squeezing graduates again.”
House of Commons18 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Graduates will bear a real and immediate burden in their payslip for the remainder of their loan for a cash-flow improvement that is modest in this Parliament and does nothing at all for the Chancellor’s balanced Budget rule. Of all the choices in November’s Budget, why did they make this one? I note that the Government’s amendment today welcomes a commitment to making the system fairer, and such commitments should be welcomed. However, graduates are waiting for action. Let me therefore set out what the Liberal Democrats would do. First, we would unfreeze the plan 2 threshold immediately and tie it to earnings, as was originally promised. Secondly, we would restore meaningful maintenance grants. Students from the poorest families can borrow £1,284 less today in real terms than in 2020-21.”
House of Commons18 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Before the election, the Education Secretary promised that graduates would pay less under Labour, as the shadow Minister said, and, in their first Budget, the Government left the threshold rising. Then, in their second Budget, the Government froze the threshold for three years from 2027. Ministers have cited a £5.9 billion figure as the yield of this change, but we should be clear about what that figure is: it is the discounted present value of extra repayments across nearly 30 years, with the bulk sitting in the 2030s, 2040s and 2050s. The annual cash impact during this Parliament is relatively small, and the change barely moves the needle on the Chancellor’s own fiscal rules.”
House of Commons18 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will turn to the threshold and the interest rate—areas on which we do substantially agree with the Conservative motion’s diagnosis, if not its proposed remedy. In the system as it stands, the interest rate matters financially only for those who repay in full, which most graduates do not. That is by design to share the costs between the graduate and the state. It means that the largest benefit of the Conservatives’ proposal would flow to the highest earners—those who repay completely. As analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown, it would be regressive in its distribution, which is why more thought is required on interest structure. On the threshold, the picture is more straightforward.”
House of Commons18 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way; I did not cover myself in glory when I responded to his point earlier, and I would like to take another bite of the cherry. The point I was trying to make was that simply basing it on salary value is not the only way to assess value. The right way to do it is through the regulator, the OfS, and to take that as just one element of many. The OfS should drive that. Would the hon. Gentleman make salary value the primary driver for all courses? [ Interruption . ]”
House of Commons18 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“At the moment, young people can see that those questions do not have satisfactory answers, and that is why we have called for a royal commission on graduate finance to address them properly. Reform of student finance is only half the picture. We are also clear that fee increases should, in return, come with clear expectations on universities about demonstrable financial sustainability, transparent reporting of how money is spent and accountability on student outcomes. None of that conditionality is on offer here. Asking students to pay more while the underlying system remains unreformed, without clear accountability for how the money is used, is not something we can support.”
House of Commons10 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship today, Sir John. I will speak briefly. The Liberal Democrats will not be supporting this draft instrument. We understand why the Government brought it forward: universities are under severe financial pressure and the sector needs sustainable funding. We absolutely accept that problem, but that does not mean that we accept the solution. Our position continues to be that any changes to fee limits must be part of a wider package of reform. Students deserve to know not just what they will pay but whether repayment terms will be fair, whether the system as a whole will treat them honestly and that the terms will not be changed against them when it is convenient.”
House of Commons10 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Minister has made that point in several debates. I would just like to explain that the commitment was to raise thresholds from when the first cohort graduated, which was in 2016. That was indeed why Martin Lewis investigated the issue and considered judicial review in 2016. There was no freezing of thresholds prior to that. They were due to rise from 2016. I am sure the Minister did not mean to misinform us.”
House of Commons10 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“T5. With nearly a million young people not in education, employment or training, the growth and skills levy is due to launch in less than a month, but as few as eight courses have been confirmed, with no funding rates, no duration and no assessment detail published. How is anyone—a young person planning their future, a college planning its provision or an employer planning its workforce—supposed to act on a blank page?”
House of Commons9 March 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We want to see that best practice become universal, with investment proportional to school size and fees, and schools expected to demonstrate their contribution through the inspection process. Faith schools in particular often have a strong tradition of community service that goes well beyond the school gates. We should recognise that and see it built upon. The Government must look seriously at the negative impact of VAT on faith and non-faith independent schools, the impact on the state sector, and the very real financial burden on families who have already paid tax into the system. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government intend to address the concerns expressed today.”
House of Commons26 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“In Kent, for example, nearly 100 state school inquiries were made in just 48 hours, after the independent Bishop Challoner school announced its closure. The state school system is already struggling with large class sizes, declining teacher numbers and increasing numbers of pupils with SEND. The Government cannot expect the state sector to absorb the pressures that these increased numbers will bring. The Liberal Democrats, however, do believe that independent schools benefiting from VAT exemptions should give back to their local communities. Indeed, many already do, through shared facilities, joint programmes and genuine partnerships with neighbouring state schools.”
House of Commons26 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It must be noted that parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities often turn to independent schools, because support is not available in local state schools. Independent schools educate more than 100,000 children with SEND. That number tells its own story. In the past year alone, 100 independent schools are reported to have closed their doors and a further 26 are predicted to follow this year. A small number of those were part of the natural churn, but the majority were not. They include primary and secondary schools, sixth-form colleges and special educational needs schools. The Liberal Democrats remain concerned that such ongoing closures will have a knock-on effect in some areas of the country, which will see an increase in pupils applying and entering the state school system.”
House of Commons26 February 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗