Britain may need to have a national debate on university tuition fees, Theresa May’s most senior minister has said after urging the Tories to modernise to win over young metropolitan voters who backed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour.

Damian Green said the current system, with fees capped at £9,250 a year, allows UK universities to deliver high quality courses and teaching, and accounts for the country’s disproportionate number of top institutions.

But the first secretary of state acknowledged that student debt is a “huge issue”, particularly after Labour unexpectedly eroded the Conservatives’ Commons majority in the general election after promising to scrap tuition fees.

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In a speech to the Bright Blue thinktank in central London on Saturday, Green urged the Tories to “change hard” to woo young, educated voters who backed Labour on 8 June.

Answering questions afterwards, he said the only way to bring down tuition fees while maintaining standards would be to raise taxes, but he acknowledged that could be the subject of a national conversation.

Asked about his message for students who backed Labour and are angry about being saddled with debt, Green said: “I think this is clearly a huge issue. I think in the long term we’ve got to show that they are getting value for the money.

“If we want to have 40%-plus of people going to university and if we want those university courses actually to be valuable, which I think is where the strain is often taken in European universities – you actually look at the teaching that you get in some European universities, you have lecture halls with 600 people in and things like that – it’s not actually as good a teaching and learning experience as you get in this country.”

He added: “If you wanted to say you want to reduce [fees] then either fewer people go to university or the experience would be less. Because the only other way you can get extra money to go in, if you wanted the same number of people, the same kind of teaching, would be to take it from working people through their taxes … it may well be that this is a national debate that we need to have.”

In a wide-ranging speech that will be seen as closely linked to May’s plans for government, Green appeared to criticise part of former PM David Cameron’s approach to modernisation, suggesting it was not necessarily about “hugging huskies, cuddling hoodie-wearing teenagers and PR stunts”. He did praise Cameron as a moderniser later in the speech.

Green acknowledged mistakes had been made during the general election campaign, describing discussions around the party’s social care policy, dubbed a “dementia tax” by critics, as “less than ideal”.

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And he said the Tories must now adapt to the changed political landscape or risk doing “serious long-term damage” to their electoral prospects. Green said: “In that classic Daily Telegraph slogan: Times Change, Values Don’t. Conservatives believe in free markets, individual liberty, a helping but not all-powerful state, strong defence and our traditional institutions as strongly as ever.

“But realistic Conservatives recognise that we need constant reform to defend those values. Fighting yesterday’s battles is a recipe for irrelevance. Tory reform is the route to a successful party, and more importantly a successful country.”

Green said the reason the Tories lost their majority in the June vote was because the party was 30 percentage points behind anti-austerity Labour among 18- to 35-year-olds.

But while acknowledging a need to tackle increasing hostility to capitalism, Green said the Tories would stick to their deficit reduction plan.

He said: “It is an inconvenient fact, all but ignored by the opposition, that the deficit is still far too high, so I am pleased we have renewed our commitment to restore the public finances by sticking to the fiscal rules announced by the chancellor in the autumn statement, which will guide us to a balanced budget by the middle of the next decade.”

However, Green said the Tories must provide answers to growing anti-austerity feelings that go beyond populism, highlighting plans to build 1.5m homes by 2022, devolve power and money locally through metro mayors and city deals, and an industrial strategy focused on new technology to give young people hope of a good job.

Green said: “The discontent with capitalism since the 2008 crash, which is vaguely expressed as being anti-austerity, needs to be tackled head-on.



“If young people feel the world is not giving them an even break, they look for radical change, even if what is being promised, by populists on the left or right, is just a better yesterday. Ukip hankers after the 1950s, Corbyn’s Labour the 1970s, with both hoping that nobody under 40 reads a history book and sees the glaring faults in those eras.”