by Gordon Brown
Having seen so many of my own school friends leave education for good at sixteen, despite having the ability to stay on, I had pushed for Education Maintenance Allowances – weekly cash allowances worth up to £30 that helped young people from low-income families stay on in school or college. This was something I had long thought important. As a young MP, I had run a ‘Back to School’ campaign with the Scottish Daily Record to encourage children to stay on in education. At one point, I had even considered removing child benefit from the parents of over-sixteens to pay grants directly to teenagers who stayed on at school. I won out against early opposition both from the Treasury and the Department for Education against the provision of maintenance allowances, and, by 2010, about 650,000 young people – a third of sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds in England – received these enabling them to stay on in education. It angers me to this day that in 2010 the incoming coalition government abandoned this help. In a decade when young people need skills and qualifications more than ever, too many British young people leave education forever at sixteen.
Of course, one of the best ways of continuing in education is through apprenticeships, and I tried to reinforce my support for them when, on the day of my first Budget in 1997, I refused to use Gladstone’s famous red box and instead my photo call outside No. 11 revealed a new Budget box made by apprentices from the Rosyth Dockyard in my constituency. For some reason, the Treasury returned it to me after I left government and this treasured possession was, for a while, on public display – alongside the tie and suit I wore delivering one of my Budgets – in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
In 2002, every sixteen- and seventeen-year-old with five GCSEs was granted the right to a Modern Apprenticeship. With the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act in 2009, we created an automatic legal right to not just qualified sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds but eighteen-year-olds too. By 2010, there were four times as many apprentices as in 1997. Side by side with this, ‘Train to Gain’ – financial support for in-work training – became a flagship initiative to upgrade workplace skills.
But there was one area where the Labour government got it spectacularly wrong and where I lost out when advocating a different course: the financing of higher education. On our desks when we came to power were the recommendations of the Dearing Committee to introduce tuition fees. In 1998, we accepted a watered-down version of this – £1,000 a year upfront fees for higher-income students, with tuition still free for 40 per cent. This did not satisfy the leading universities, who argued that their fee income was insufficient. I agreed that universities had to be properly funded, as we encouraged more young people to enter, and did not doubt that graduates should share in meeting the cost of tuition with parents and government. But at the same time, I was worried about who might be financially hurt or discouraged from university. As early as June 2000, I commissioned a Treasury paper which showed how a loan system to pay for tuition costs was the wrong answer. The Department for Education’s proposal – and Tony’s – was a version of the Australian system: variable fees capped at £3,000 per year.
This led to a battle royale inside government. At the Treasury, we had been investigating an alternative to tuition fees in the form of a graduate tax. Our analysis concluded that, with middle-class university entry almost at saturation point, our target of 50 per cent participating in higher education could only be met if we widened participation to those from less well-off backgrounds, who were traditionally under-represented. The advantage of a graduate tax – unlike the system of fees then in place – was that it would make university study genuinely free to students at the point of delivery: meaning students from poorer families, who were much more likely to be ‘loan-averse’, would be faced with incurring a future tax liability rather than having to take out a loan. The main drawback would be the extra cash cost in the short term – but this was something I would have been prepared to fund.
In the thirteen years after 1997, university admissions grew from less than 40 per cent to 46 per cent. This happened because of higher school attainment at secondary school, the removal of the cap on student numbers, and the increased routes to higher degrees, especially from further-education colleges, which now represent 10 per cent of all graduates. But while we increased participation from low-income groups, the relative chances of low- and high-income students getting to university barely changed, particularly at the most prestigious universities where entry rates for disadvantaged students changed little. My frustration with our lack of progress in widening access led to one notable incident.
Back in 2000, when we celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, which had been introduced by Barbara Castle, at a TUC reception in her honour, I raised the case that had already been publicised in the newspapers of Laura Spence, a young northern student who had been rejected by Oxford on the basis of examiners’ notes which assessed her as not suitable for the university. I said her exclusion was a scandal and called on Oxbridge to reform its entry procedures. The minute I sided with Laura, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and The Times – all of which had previously been sympathetic to her – reversed their positions. I was accused of dumbing down, of abandoning the objective of excellence, of denigrating the good intentions of our ancient universities. Faced with the hostility of Oxbridge and having little support from my colleagues, I fought the issue to a draw. Laura went to Harvard and I focused on widening university admissions, monitored by a new Office for Fair Access to ensure universities set out clear plans for recruiting students from under-represented or disadvantaged backgrounds. Spend on improving access for working-class students doubled from under £400 million to nearly £800 million, not least through the ‘Aim Higher’ programme – again, sadly, scrapped by the coalition government – which supported university outreach through mentoring schemes, masterclasses and summer schools.
The final decision on tuition fees was made at a meeting of the Domestic Affairs Cabinet Committee, chaired by John Prescott, in January 2003. During the committee’s deliberations, Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, conceded that his proposals for the introduction of fees were regressive. I said that my preferred option was to develop what I called ‘a pooled, progressive tax’, tapered according to the income of the graduate, so that over a time-limited repayment period, a higher-earning graduate would pay more than the lower-earning graduate who, for example, might have chosen to teach or work for a charity. The variable, deferred tuition fees advocated by the Department of Education would be unfair, I argued, especially for those taking career breaks to look after a child yet who would still have to pay back the full amount.
Friends of mine were prepared to vote tuition fees down because of the unfairness. In particular, Nick Brown, who had never voted against the government in his political life, warned me and others of the electoral consequences; and there can be little doubt that much of the youth vote moved towards the Liberal Democrats in 2005 because of the decision we made. In the Commons vote at the end of January 2004, the government won on tuition fees by only five votes – 316 votes to 311. In total, seventy-one Labour MPs voted against and nineteen abstained.
Despite my own doubts – and, more importantly, his – Nick and several of his colleagues who were opposed to the plans voted with the government out of loyalty. To help explain this decision to their constituents, I told them of a concession that had been won: maintenance grants to cover accommodation and food, which had been wrongly abolished in 1998, would be reinstated for low-income students, who would also receive some help with their fees.
When I became prime minister, I hoped to move the country from tuition fees to a graduate tax but the initial costs of such a move was prohibitive. Even if it were affordable, I also knew merely moving to a system of free tuition was not enough. We had seen that even without tuition fees in Scotland – it was a Labour administration that first rejected them – maintenance grants were being cut, hurting poorer students. The fee cancellation was
being funded by reducing grants and dramatically cutting college places. In the absence of a better grant system to pay for books, accommodation and living expenses, free tuition had, in fact, become a benefit to students from higher-income backgrounds.
But there were changes we could make that would transform a loan into something closer to a graduate tax – and that is what we did. The key was to convert what was seen as a debt to be repaid in full to a graduate contribution more firmly based on the ability of the graduate to pay. If you started to pay back only on a fair share of your earnings, and thus after you were really able to do so, with repayments not charged at high rates of interest, then to all intents and purposes you now had a graduate tax – and, of course, it was collected like a tax linked to earnings, not by a collector running down your debt. Even so, we could only move in stages to a system where payments were no longer based on final debt but on actual earnings.
We announced graduates would be entitled to earn more before they started to pay anything and could have a longer period in which to pay. But because we had not yet moved to a full-blooded graduate tax, we hesitated to call it a ‘graduate contribution’. We also took measures to ameliorate students’ worries about what they had to pay in total: they would pay at fair rates of interest. And because we were worried that poorer students did not have enough money for their immediate expenses we increased the value of maintenance grants for poorer students.
The tuition-fee review Peter Mandelson had ordered from Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP – which proposed raising the tuition fee ceiling from £3,000 to £9,000 – would have landed on my desk if we had been returned in 2010. It would have made the case for a graduate tax more pressing than ever, and so, at a later date, would proposals to raise the interest rate – to as high as 6.1 per cent in 2017 – at which students paid back their loans. For students starting in 2017 average debt on graduation will be just over £50,000. This is more than double the average debt students would have faced had the system remained unchanged after 2011. What’s more, the starting point of repayment was meant to rise with average earnings after 2015. Yet by initially freezing it until 2021 at £21,000 and now at £25,000 for post-2012 students, and by retaining tuition fees at £9,250 until only 2019, the Conservatives have moved us further away from a graduate contribution towards a more rigid debt repayment system. Under the terms of the student-loan book sale, first-time graduates may now also find their loans reported on credit files – in breach of another promise. In time, we will come to the conclusion that what you pay should not be the so-called ‘debt’ you owe – 77 per cent won’t clear their debt and interest charges within thirty years – but the percentage of your earnings that you can afford: in other words, a graduate tax in which the government shares the cost of higher education equitably with the graduate.
Before I became prime minister, my main role in decisions on law and order and policing was simply setting and settling the funding totals for police, prisons and the courts. But I felt that the public deserved a more personalised form of service delivery here too. As a result, I introduced our ‘policing pledge’, guaranteeing quick police response times, a more sympathetic approach to victims, and better neighbourhood policing. Under Jacqui Smith and then Alan Johnson in the Home Office – and Jack Straw at Justice – we worked to ensure local communities could do more to set their own local priorities: where to position police on the beat, CCTV, the lighting of streets, and how offenders discharged their community payback. We were innovative in other ways too: with the help of Britain’s leading social entrepreneur Sir Ronald Cohen, we agreed to pilot what were called social impact bonds that paid charities by results – in this case a highly impressive success rate in rehabilitating young offenders in Peterborough.
Under the 1997–2010 Labour administration, crime fell by 40 per cent, with 7 million fewer crimes committed every year. Ours was the first government since records began under which crime went down and not up, a tribute not only to the professionalism of all our public servants but the 33,000 extra police – 17,000 more police officers and 16,000 new Police Community Support Officers – backed up by 26,000 extra prison places. Of course, problems remained – illegal immigration was one – but with police numbers rising and prison places expanding, why were we on the back foot on law and order? There were many reasons why we lost the battle – for example, one complaint from a victim of crime can send a more powerful message than any good set of statistics about cuts in crime – but a perhaps more important reason was that our record was easily traduced because of the damage done by a series of leaks over an eighteen-month period, emanating from the private office of the Home Secretary to the then Tory immigration spokesman and now First Secretary of State in Theresa May’s government, Damian Green.
For what seemed to be the promise of a job with the Conservative Party, a young civil servant who had previously run as a Tory council candidate in his home town of Sunderland was handing Green highly sensitive Home Office documents, including detailed confidential figures and private advice to Jacqui (advice that I had never seen) – powerful ammunition to use at Prime Minister’s Questions if it fell into the hands of the leader of the Opposition.
I could never understand why David Cameron appeared to have information I did not even know existed. But from my very early Prime Minister’s Questions, he regularly seemed to make use of this stolen information. The embarrassing Home Office memos, some of which went direct to the press, included internal data on illegal immigrants, stop-and-search, security breaches, operational codes for the police, forecasts of rising crime, even a list of Labour MPs rebelling over terrorist laws. It was no comfort that after the police traced them to Green and the civil servant, they botched their response, with the House of Commons’ serjeant-at-arms sanctioning a police raid on Green’s office without a warrant. What should have been a simple matter of dealing with a politically motivated leaker turned into a cause célèbre about the freedom of Parliament and the press. A problem others had created for us escalated into a public relations nightmare for the government.
But more important and wider lessons were being learned: it takes both reform and resources to assure high-quality public services. Reform without investment is a cynical slogan. Investment without reform will yield too little. 2008 proved we needed both.
In foreign affairs too, there was a period of calm before the financial storm. In the early months of 2008, before the crisis hit hardest, I was able to focus on international issues beyond Iraq and Afghanistan (which I discuss in the next chapters), undertake long-planned foreign visits and do something to restore Britain’s international standing after the setbacks over Iraq.
There was a time when diplomacy amounted to the Foreign Secretary sending off telegrams and ambassadors on the ground doing the talking. The management of foreign affairs has been revolutionised since then. Now prime ministers regularly meet their counterparts at annual gatherings – the United Nations annual General Assembly, the G8, the NATO Council and European summits – and on any day you can talk by phone or video. It is yet another instance in which the direct involvement of the prime minister has so markedly expanded. Communications between governments that once took months, were highly impersonal and conducted in the main below the level of national leaders, now rely on constant personal contact at the top. This means that for a prime minister today, foreign affairs involve not only the calculation of national interests and ideas but the cultivation of a wide range of different individual relationships.
With the Asian economy on its way to becoming bigger than that of America or the West, I started 2008 with visits first to Delhi to persuade Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of the value of a world trade agreement, and then to Beijing to cement the strategic economic partnership with China that I had been building while chancellor. As always I stressed our human-rights concerns. For the first time Premier Wen held an open town-hall meeting where he and I answered questions from local citizens. Our
talks ranged freely from the debt he owed to the Scottish moral philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith, to his prediction that the Internet would bring democracy to China. I asked him for China’s support for the release from house arrest of the Burmese leader whose freedom I had long supported, Aung San Suu Kyi. Strengthening the relationship with China was even more imperative than I realised at the time. When the financial crisis struck with full force and Britain was to lead in forging an international response, securing Chinese engagement was essential.
Keen as well to strengthen our ties with our European partners after disagreement over Iraq, I conferred in Berlin with Chancellor Merkel and was in regular touch with Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris before his state visit to Britain at the end of March. Sarkozy and I formed a strong working relationship. Around this time he informed me privately of his upcoming marriage to Carla Bruni. Again, these European partners, as well as Prime Minister Zapatero of Spain and the Portuguese president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso, were to become major allies alongside Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia in fighting the global economic recession.
I flew to Italy to see Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who was at the time beset by court cases threatening his survival in office. I knew he would present me with a box of Italian-made ties, as he always did. My staff asked what he would welcome in return. ‘A friendly judge,’ I joked. But the meeting had a serious purpose. He was preparing to chair the G8 in 2009. It was important that I recruit the Italians to the idea of greater global economic cooperation. This would later prove essential: had the advanced economies clung to the G8 as the premier forum of economic cooperation, it would have been impossible to create the larger G20 without which we could never have halted worldwide economic depression.