Lib Dems face up to figure rejig

The Liberal Democrats face up to figures that won't add up.

The Liberal Democrats have gone back to the drawing board on costing their proposals for a new further and higher education funding system. Plans outlined in their policy paper The Key to Lifelong Learning no longer add up after the party was forced by members to drop proposals for students to pay a contribution towards fees.

Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat education spokesman, admitted this week at the party's conference in Brighton that the decision earlier this year to remove fee-charging from the proposals had left a 5 per cent funding gap.

"It does require us now, in the light of the changes that have taken place, to look at that 5 per cent that now remains to be filled. It is that missing 5 per cent of the policy that we have to work on. But the difference between us and the other parties is that we admit it," he said.

What the 5 per cent means in cash terms is yet to be determined. Mr Foster said it would become clear once the party had produced its manifesto budget. The hole in the party's further and higher education funding model emerged as Paddy Ashdown, the Liberal Democrat leader, promised in his conference speech to make Britain "the number one learning society in the world" with "clear, specific, costed" policies.

In an interview with The THES, Mr Ashdown said that both the Conservatives and Labour had taken refuge from difficult funding decisions on further and higher education, and predicted that after the General Election they would end up "substantially where the Liberal Democrats are now". He said he eventually wanted a unified further and higher education funding regime, which put the power of choice in the hands of the students through individual learning accounts which could be used to support them on any course.

"Institutions have become too much like ivory towers. They are providing what they think the student should have. But soon students will begin to demand new kinds of courses. More learning in the home and the workplace, which means you can expand higher education without losing quality," he said.

Mr Foster is worried, however, that the party's decision to leave fee-paying to the state will remove much of the student power built in to the original funding proposals. "If students are not making a contribution to fees, you remove that element of the marketplace which gave them the power," he said.