Nick Boles takes swipe at National Union of Students as Labour attempt to block proposal to replace grants with loans is voted down in Commons

A political party’s attitude towards student finance is a leading indicator of its fitness for government, the skills minister Nick Boles has said, describing the National Union of Students (NUS) as “the national union of shroud wavers”.

Speaking in a Commons debate on the government’s decision to scrap student maintenance grants and replace them with loans, Boles said the government had to choose between limiting access to a university education or offering all those able to benefit from it “a system of subsidised student finance”.

Ministers have been accused of attempting to sneak proposals to end student grants in England though parliament without proper scrutiny by using a statutory instrument, which does not require a vote in the House of Commons. The Labour party tabled an annulment motion to try to block the proposal on Tuesday, but it was voted down by 306 to 292.

“A party’s attitude towards student finance is a leading indicator of its fitness to govern,” said Boles. “In opposition, a party will take the irresponsible route in an attempt to curry favour with the national union of shroud wavers, sorry, students.

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“In government it will suddenly discover the merits of a sustainable system of student finance that is fair to students and taxpayers alike.

“Madam deputy speaker, if we are ever to see another Labour government – and on the basis of their current performance it may be a very long time – I confidently predict that it will quietly drop its opposition to the system of student finance put in place by governments of all parties over 20 years.”

Eleanor Laing, a deputy speaker of the House of Commons, was called on to ask Boles to withdraw his comments about the NUS. “The honourable gentleman’s language was perhaps not exactly what I would have chosen myself as a matter of taste, but it is not for me to tell the minister exactly which words to use,” she said.

“He was not strictly out with the rules of the house. I am sure he will now, very positively, return to a more tasteful and moderate language.”

The shadow education minister Gordon Marsden said the government had shied away from scrutiny on the issue and preferred instead to use a “legislative sleight of hand” in the hope that no one would notice.

“When the government tripled tuition fees in 2012 they tried to sweeten the pill by talking up the centrality of the maintenance grant to ensuring that the most disadvantaged could still access higher education,” Marsden said.

“They promised three things: a national scholarship programme, the maintenance grants for the disadvantaged programme and an earnings-related threshold that would be up-rated with inflation.”

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The shadow business secretary, Angela Eagle, said that despite Labour’s best attempts the government had succeeded in forcing through sweeping changes that would “see students from the poorest backgrounds graduate with more debt than their better-off peers and do little to improve government finances in the long-run”.

She added: “The Tories’ assault on aspiration makes a mockery of their claim to be a ‘one nation party’ as instead of investing in future generations they are betraying students, and through this opportunity tax they’re pulling up the drawbridge for young people from less privileged backgrounds.”



The proposal to scrap student maintenance grants in English universities in favour of loans by September 2016 was first put forward by George Osborne in his July budget announcement.

Under the current system, university students from families with household incomes of £25,000 or less are entitled to a grant to cover living costs of £3,387 a year. The grant decreases as the family’s income increases and ends when a household earns more than £42,620.

Under the new system, from September 2016 students will get a higher amount of up to £8,200 but this will all have to be repaid under the same terms as existing loans once a graduate earns more than £21,000 a year.

Responding to Boles’s comments, Megan Dunn, the NUS president, said: “While I’ll admit I had to Google what ‘shroud-wavers’ meant, when the education minister has to make terrible jokes during a debate on the future of hundreds of thousands of students – a debate NUS, students’ unions and opposition parties had to fight tooth and nail for – it shows the Tories know they are on the wrong side of a very unpopular debate.

“We have successfully challenged their lack of transparency and scrutiny and they know it.”