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Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: No.
Mr. Hall: The hon. Lady says no, but she is completely wrong, as she is on every other issue.
Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: No.
Mr. Hall: The hon. Lady continues to make the same mistakes. No doubt she will continue with the arrogant view that the Conservative party has nothing to fear from the electorate when it has everything to fear.
The new clause strengthens the democratic process and is, therefore, nothing to fear. Accepting it would show, at this late stage, in the 17th year of the Conservative Government, that they have some regard to the democratic process. They would then be able to consider at length the principles involved in the Bill, which legislates for the use of taxpayers' money to subsidise private institutions to provide student loans. That is a crucial part of the Bill and represents a fundamental change from the current policy.
Parliament needs to give far more consideration to the principle of using taxpayers' money to subsidise banks to do the same business that they have carried out for years. Why do high-street banks or other financial institutions in the business of lending money need huge subsidies from the taxpayer to allow them to participate in the business in which they have been established for many years? That fundamental question goes to the core of the Bill and is one reason why new clause 3 is so important.
The new clause would allow proper parliamentary scrutiny. As I have said, although we have considered the Bill on Second Reading and in Standing Committee and we are now considering it on Report and no doubt will on Third Reading, we still do not know the precise cost to the taxpayer.
When the matter was raised in Committee, the Minister said that we will know the full cost to the taxpayer 12 months after the scheme has been implemented. Therefore, Parliament will not know how much the legislation will cost until October 1998. That is totally unsatisfactory and is an abuse of the democratic process.
Parliament needs to know the cost of the scheme and the new clause would allow us to address the errors in the Bill. It may well allow the Government to justify what we have said--that the estimated cost of the subsidy is £1,500 per loan. We used that figure throughout the Standing Committee and the Minister decided not to disavow it. He has made no comment whatsoever about the costs. Perhaps he is frightened to reveal them because he knows full well that the Government's use of money would create an outrage. Now he refuses to say whether the figure of £1,500 is right or wrong. The Minister may find it funny, but if the Government are prepared to subsidise high-street banks or private institutions at a cost of £1,500 per loan, perhaps they should give the money directly to the students and ease the problems of student poverty that has been well documented by my hon. Friends.
Implementation of the new clause would allow us to evaluate the effect of the Education (Student Loans) Bill on students. It is clear that the Government have been prepared to legislate to include discrimination. They decided that students should not be told why they may have been refused a private sector student loan; they see no reason why students need to know why they have been refused and they see nothing wrong in the institutions refusing the loans passing that information on to a third party. That is scandalous. It is an outrage in itself. The
Government decided quite straightforwardly that there should be no appeals procedure. All that involves taxpayers' money to support our public education system. We need to build some accountability into that system and new clause 3 allows us to do that.
The Minister may respond by saying that the new clause expects him to negotiate on the Floor of the House the deals between the Government and the private sector. It does not. The Government can conduct their negotiations with the private sector, work out which banks are involved, produce the costs and tell us the implications of the scheme and that information will be available and ready to be used in the new Parliament on 31 May 1997, therefore the argument about negotiation on the Floor of the House does not hold water.
The other argument that the Minister used in Committee against the approach in new clause 3 was that it would delay the progress of the Bill. However, he has now delayed the progress of the Bill and moved the implementation date to October 1997, therefore there is no reason not to accept the new clause. The rationale of the arguments that the Government used in Committee does not apply. It does not stand up to scrutiny, so I hope that, even at this late stage, the Government will support the democratic process and allow hon. Members to do the job for which they were elected--to scrutinise legislation and improve it where they can.
Mr. Forth:
We have not yet learnt what Opposition Members would do. I fought valiantly in Committee to winkle that out of them, but I failed totally. Yet again, the hon. Member for Wallsend (Mr. Byers) disappointed us, although he did not surprise us. It was also significant that the right hon. Member for Halton (Mr. Oakes), in the perceptive way that we would expect of a Member of such experience, said with some sadness that he could detect no policies emerging from the Labour party.
We learnt only one significant and interesting fact, for which I am grateful. The hon. Member for Wallsend accepts--by implication, so do his colleagues--that the general election will not take place until April or May 1997. That was a step in the right direction. It gives not just the debate, but other matters, an interesting perspective. I assume that he has the approval of the Leader of the Opposition in making that statement. If he has not, that is something for the hon. Gentleman to sort out. That is part of the background to new clause 3.
The other piece of background that the House will want to recall is that the measure was duly signalled in the normal way as part of the Government's programme. It received a Second Reading and was considered in Committee, where, as has been said, I resisted an Opposition amendment to put on the face the Bill an arbitrary delay in the implementation period.
I then announced a delay of one year, because, for perfectly practical reasons, the financial institutions that might be interested in picking up the opportunities offered in the Bill persuaded me--with no great difficulty--that it would take that length of time properly to put in place the procedures and mechanisms to give effect to the Bill's measures.
Mr. Hall:
The Minister has just said that, during his discussions with the private sector institutions, they revealed that they would find it difficult to be ready for 1997, because of the information technology
Mr. Forth:
The answer is no. I should correct the hon. Gentleman. The difficulty would have been with implementation in 1996, which was the original target date. There would be no difficulty with implementation in 1997, unless the House were to agree to the new clause--which I hope it will not--in which case there would be no possibility of meeting that target date for implementation in 1997. To implement the measure in time for the start of the 1997-98 academic year, contracts would have to be finalised by the mid-point of this year, to give the financial institutions sufficient time. To delay the Bill in the way that new clause 3 proposes would defer implementation until 1998, which would be unacceptable.
Another argument for new clause 3 is a constitutional theory of which I was not hitherto aware--that a Government are unable to make any new policies or commitments, or to promote their legislative programme, in the 15 to 18 months before the likely date of a general election--or, as the hon. Member for Warrington, South (Mr. Hall) told me, the actual date of the next general election. That is new stuff of which I was not aware.
I am not sure that new clause 3 is the correct vehicle for an entirely new constitutional theory that will guide us in the governance of this country. It seems that Opposition Members are persuaded that there must be a sterile period of 15 to 18 months before a possible general election, even though we generally do not know when a general election will be. That seems a complication, although Opposition Members seem secure in their knowledge that a general election will not occur until spring 1997. That is all a horrible muddle, and simply will not do.
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