Hugh Bayley: I have to fight this cheese-paring attack on universities

The UK has some of the best universities in the world. One of the reasons the UK experienced stronger economic growth over the past decade than other countries in the European Union is that we have better universities and so a better knowledge base for our businesses.

York has two exceptionally good universities, and they have helped to drive economic growth in the local economy. Between 1997 and 2009, the number of jobs in York grew from 44,000 to 60,600 – a 38 per cent growth, far outstripping the national or regional average.

Many of those jobs are hi-tech, high-skill jobs, but they bring lower-skill jobs in their wake. The importance of universities is not lost on our economic competitors. State investment in universities grows apace in India, China and many other countries.

Indeed, other OECD countries, which, like the UK, are having to cut their public expenditure, are also, and almost without exception, increasing spending on higher education because they know that it will aid recovery.

Only the UK and Romania are cheese-paring our universities. I have first-hand experience of cheese-paring, because I was an academic at the University of York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the last Conservative government cut funding.

Two years ago, Chris Patten, a former chairman of the Conservative party, made a speech in which he said "on just over a decade we doubled the number of students and halved the investment in each", which led to "poorer pay, degraded facilities, less money to support the teaching of each student".

I did not sign the National Union of Students pledge before the last election, even though I am a former vice-president of the NUS, because I knew that universities badly need extra money.

I thought that a modest increase in what students pay after graduation would have been fair had there also been an increase in Government funding, but I cannot support the Government in increasing fees by some 5,000 – almost 6,000 – and cutting the tuition grant to universities by 80 per cent.

I cannot support the Government's plans because they are reducing state funding for universities. That is a betrayal of the country's future and a betrayal of the future of this country's young people, especially young women.

The Liberal Democrat manifesto pledged "We will...Tackle the gender gap at all levels of scientific study and research".

A recent research paper on higher education funding, published last month, reveals that women make up more than 80 per cent of the bottom half of graduates by lifetime income and just over one per cent of the top 30 per cent.

Yet the same paper says that average repayments as a proportion of lifetime income are more than twice as much for the bottom 50 per cent as for the top 10 per cent.

That reveals how regressive and unfair the Government's proposals are to women.

Under Labour, higher education funding increased by 25 per cent and undergraduate numbers increased by 20 per cent. The number of young people from York going to university for the first time increased from just over 2,000 in 1997 to more than 3,000 in 2008.

York's two universities received more than 150m in capital from the Government between 2000 and 2010, rising from 500,000 a year at the start of the period to 28m at the end.

Now that legacy is being swept away by Lib Dem and Conservative spending review policies.

It is no surprise that there is anger on the streets of this country – the big society seems to be finding its voice.

Hugh Bayley is the Labour MP for York Central. This is an edited extract of a speech that he gave in the House of Commons.