The day-old pact between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties in Britain to form a governing coalition is provoking alarm among the country’s main faculty and student unions for its provisions relating to higher education.
The terms of the coalition agreement specify that the Liberal Democrats will be able to abstain from voting on divisive issues, including a possible change in the financing of higher education. The move has prompted the unions to warn the Liberal Democrat Party not to back down from its previous commitment to phase out university tuition entirely over several years.
An independent review of how Britain’s higher-education system is financed is due this year. The Liberal Democrats, the junior partners in the new government, are the only major party to have articulated a policy position on the role of tuition in university financing. The Conservatives and the Labour party have not staked out an official stand on the issue.
The coalition agreement specifies that if the government’s response to the pending review “is one that Liberal Democrats cannot accept, then arrangements will be made to enable Liberal Democrat members of Parliament to abstain in any vote.” If that happens, the Conservatives could have control over key higher-education policy decisions. The Conservatives are thought to be likely to back an increase in university tuition or perhaps even the removal of the government-mandated cap on tuition.
On Wednesday the president-elect of the National Union of Students published an open letter to Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader and new deputy prime minister, warning him that abstentions by the party’s members of Parliament on tuition-related legislation would not be acceptable. He said “the faith students and their families have placed in the Liberal Democrats must now be repaid.”
The letter made clear that students expect the party to actively “oppose any attempt to raise the cap on fees” and to deliver on its “commitments to work to introduce a fairer alternative to higher fees.”
Along with every other elected Liberal Democrat member of Parliament, Vince Cable, who has been put in charge of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, signed a pre-election pledge circulated by the National Union of Students to “vote against any increase in fees in the next Parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative.” The department has had responsibility for higher education since it was created in 2009, but it is not yet clear that it will continue to do so in the new government.
The main faculty union, which has also called for the complete abolition of tuition, issued its own statement on Wednesday, noting the Liberal Democrats’ “well-documented” opposition to university tuition and warning that the party members’ “failure to use their new influence” when the university-financing review is complete would be “a considerable letdown.”
The union said that it looked forward to confirmation that the party had managed to persuade their new Conservative partners of abolishing tuition entirely “over an agreed time scale.”