Collusion claim as universities set £9,000 fees

Charging the highest rate had become a “status symbol” for vice chancellors who are “greedy to maintain income and their own salary levels”, according to a leading trade union official.

Mike Robinson, Unite’s national officer for higher education, told the Business Innovation and Skills Select Committee that the issue of university tuition fees was worrying his union.

Giving evidence yesterday, he said: “We would like this committee to look at how fee setting has been set. There are a number of institutions going at £9,000 and we don’t think it is an accident.

“We think it is deliberate, whether it’s planned between them is a concern.”

Universities should be transparent about how they set their fees, he added.

Speaking afterwards, Mr Robinson said: “If there has been any collusion between the universities to charge the maximum of £9,000 that would be for the Office of Fair Trading to investigate.”

He claimed the vast majority of universities which had announced their intended fees were planning to charge £9,000.

He said: “This is despite the Government’s claim that only ‘top end’ institutions would charge the highest fees. The fee increases are a runaway train, with an enormous financial crash at the end, that the public purse will have to pick up.

“We are hoping there is no collusion between universities to all charge the highest rate, but it has become a status symbol for vice-chancellors, greedy to maintain income and, of course, their own salary levels.”

Mr Robinson told the hearing that plans to raise tuition fees from next year had not been thought through.

MPs voted to raise fees to between £6,000 and £9,000 from 2012 at the end of last year.

The cap has been raised alongside massive cuts to teaching budgets which will make universities much more reliant on money they receive through student fees.

In the Comprehensive Spending Review, Ministers announced that university teaching budgets would be cut by £2.9bn over four years. Only degree subjects in science, technology, engineering and maths will continue to receive any state funding.

The Government has also announced a major cut to university’s research budgets.

At the time of the controversial vote to raise the cap on fees, Ministers claimed that universities would only charge £9,000 in “exceptional circumstances”.

However so far, most universities are clustering around the £9,000 mark.

This has raised the prospect of further funding cuts to higher education as the Government has budgeted on providing money for tuition fee loans to students based on the assumption that the average amount charged by universities would be £7,500.

Aaron Porter, who is standing down as president of the National Union of Students, told the committee yesterday that institutions were making “strategic decisions” on fees based on what they will look like to prospective students.

“Until there’s a comprehensive relationship between the price that’s being charged and the quality that’s on offer, I am not assured that the price that’s being charged is a fair reflection of what that undergraduate is likely to receive,” he said.

Mr Porter said that in his private conversations with vice chancellors they had expressed concerns that by setting lower fees they would be perceived to be offering a worse product.

The debate on fees took place yesterday as more universities announced what they planned to charge from next year.

The University of Central Lancashire became the latest institution to confirm it intended to set fees to the maximum £9,000-a-year level.

However several others announced fees below the maximum cap. Portsmouth announced proposals to introduce fees of £8,500 while London South Bank University is set to charge between £5,950 for an undergraduate foundation degree at a partner college, to £8,450 for a full-time degree.

Derby University said it plans to set its fees at less than £7,500 for most courses. Only two universities in Yorkshire have announced their fee levels for next year so far.

Leeds University, a member of the elite Russell Group, plans to charge £9,000-a-year while Leeds Metropolitan has announced that it plans to charge fees of £8,500 a year for courses starting in 2012.