How English universities won a fee rise – and what happens next

Hope was in short supply for English university leaders following Rachel Reeves’ first budget, announced in the House of Commons last week.

As the chancellor finished speaking – and it became clear that institutions were being hit with a huge national insurance bill with no movement on funding – many were incredulous.

One told Times Higher Education that it was a “cataclysmic” situation; another spoke of large-scale job losses. Others lamented the failure of the sector’s lobbyists to “cut through”, with any movement on funding seemingly confined to 2025 at the earliest.

The anger had barely had time to subside before things began to shift again. Murmurings began of a fee rise being inherent in the budget calculations, and talk turned to a “statutory instrument” in January as the next chance to announce a new fee cap.

In the event, it came much sooner than that, with some briefed over the weekend that a rise was coming and then the Commons itself being told just five days after the budget, fulfilling a wish that many sector leaders had spent more than two years campaigning for in earnest.

The timing of the announcement at first appeared odd – why not bury what will always be an unpopular decision within the much wider budget process, when attention is pulled various directions?

But taking it out of the fiscal process has allowed ministers to frame the move as an emergency stopgap, ahead of a much wider period of promised reform.

That assumes that everything had been planned to happen this way, of course, and it could have just been a matter of failing to iron out the details in time, with a paragraph on tuition fees stripped from Ms Reeves’ speech at the last minute.

Cynical observers could also point to the US election as providing a smokescreen that meant, while fees dominated the news agenda for much of Monday afternoon, it had all but disappeared from the news sites’ home pages on Tuesday.

Given how unpopular fee rises have proven in the past, sector leaders were quietly pleased with the media reaction as a whole.

Few in the wider public could have been overly surprised that a rise was coming, given the numerous warnings about university finances over the past few months.

And talk of fees needing to climb beyond £10,000 – possibly as high as £13,000 – may have proven helpful, given the reality – at least for now – has come in at far lower.

Campaigning from the likes of influential figures such as Martin Lewis, who have emphasised that few students will actually pay more overall, could also have had some cut-through.

This will all be helpful as universities make the case that fee rises should become the norm, going up by inflation each year, rather than a repeat of the 2017 situation in which a small boost was followed by a long freeze.

But vice-chancellors and ministers alike will be wary of the view that students are essentially footing the bill for the higher costs universities face – paying more to “keep the lights on and their courses open”, as Alex Stanley of the National Union of Students put it. But convincing the government to come up with more direct funding to redress the balance of who pays for an undergraduate’s education will be far from easy.

There are also questions about how the sector should articulate the obvious reality that the fee rise will barely touch the sides of the increased pay and pension costs they face, with some believing that continued grumbling is not helpful but others arguing the need to show the true impact of the decisions made.

Despite stressing that “major reform” was coming, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, was light on the details in her address to Parliament, implying that the terms of any future funding settlements are far from settled.

Securing an immediate fee rise was, however, perhaps the most difficult of all the battles over university funding that needed to be won. And as unlikely as it looked just a week ago, universities have just – at least partially – done it.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com