Labour is examining its legal options to challenge the government’s decision to raise the student tuition fees cap, after ministers refused to allow a parliamentary vote.

The Conservatives did not allow government time for a debate and binding vote amid fears MPs would have blocked the proposed increase in fees from £9,000 to £9,250 a year.

Labour passed a non-binding motion against the measure on Wednesday with the support of other opposition parties including Theresa May’s political partners in the Democratic Unionist party.

However, the government has no legal obligation to take the motion into account and the time limit for stopping the changes has already passed.

Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, said it amounted to a “constitutional crisis”, as ministers had promised before the election to abide by convention and allocate government time for a formal vote in the House of Commons.

She said it set a worrying precedent for scrutiny of the deluge of statutory instruments that the government will push through as part of Brexit.

A senior Labour source said the party was consulting lawyers and there was a slim possibility of bringing a judicial review. It was also examining options for trying to reverse the regulations through the House of Lords.



Regulations by negative statutory instrument are allowed to pass without a debate and vote if there is no formal objection, but Labour “prayed against” the changes to register its discontent.

The government had initially promised a vote. In March the then leader of the Commons, David Lidington, said: “Slots have been provided for debates on the prayers against the statutory instruments concerning tuition fees and the personal independence payment.”



However, the debate was delayed by the election and no new vote was given time by the government during the 40 days until the regulations came into force. Labour suspects ministers refused time for a vote after the election because they knew May only had a majority with the support of the DUP, which opposes raising student fees.

The DUP signalled that it backed Labour’s non-binding motion against the rise on Wednesday, so the government allowed it to pass without a vote to avoid defeat.

During the debate, Rayner said raising tuition fees by another £250 a year was “unsustainable for students and completely unfair”.

She told the Guardian afterwards: “Just days ago the government told us that we could trust them with the powers in the Brexit bill because ministers could not change the law without parliament agreeing to it. Yet today they are changing the law despite the House of Commons voting against it.

“In the space of a week the Tories have gone from Henry VIII to Charles I, simply ignoring elected MPs and ruling by decree. If they want to avoid a constitutional crisis, they must accept this vote and immediately confirm that they will abandon this rise in tuition fees.”



Justine Greening, the education secretary, ignored the criticism about a formal vote being denied and focused instead on Labour’s student finance policy, which she said was “a cold, calculating con-trick on young people”.

Greening told MPs that Labour’s policy was to have no tuition fees, which she said would lead to “fewer students at worse universities” and amounted to “anti-social mobility policy writ large”.

She said: “Far from being the friend of students and universities, their policy would destroy opportunity and destroy our world-class universities. This house, Mr Speaker, should see straight through it – frankly, this motion isn’t even worth the paper it’s written on.”

A Conservative source said the government believed it had given Labour enough opportunity to oppose the regulations for a rise in tuition fees, and the party had not taken the most recent chance to lay a motion against it in the House of Lords.

Andrea Leadsom, Lidington’s successor as Conservative leader of the Commons, said the usual process had been “interrupted” by the election and confirmed that the time limit for reversing the regulations had expired.