Labour leader said before election he would ‘deal with’ debts, but now says that was not a commitment to write them off

Jeremy Corbyn has insisted Labour did not commit to wiping graduates’ student loan debts during the general election campaign, after Conservative MPs accused the party of knowingly misleading students.

The Labour leader told NME magazine during the election that he would “deal with” the huge debts acquired by graduates who had paid high tuition fees, as well as abolishing fees for current students.

“I don’t see why those that had the historical misfortune to be at university during the £9,000 period should be burdened excessively compared to those that went before or those that come after. I will deal with it,” he told the magazine.

However, Corbyn told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that was not a commitment to write off the debt, currently more than £76bn owed by English students and EU students studying in England. “I didn’t make a commitment to write it off because I couldn’t at that stage,” he said.

Corbyn said the party was not aware of how much writing off the debt burden would cost. “What I said was we would deal with it by trying to reduce the burden of it,” he said. “We never said we would completely abolish it because we were unaware of the size of it at that time.”

The Labour leader said the party had established a working group to develop a policy on how a future Labour government could ease the burden for those who had racked up huge debts over the past few years. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has suggested students in England are set to graduate with average debts of £50,800.

“Quite a lot of it is never going to be collected anyway,” he said, given that graduate debt is written off after 30 years and only repaid when a graduate is earning more than £17,775.

“[The shadow chancellor] John McDonnell has established a working party to look at this policy and we will be making a statement which will set out what our plans are in the future,” he said.

During the final week in parliament, Conservative MPs regularly attacked Labour for appearing to mislead young graduates, after both McDonnell and the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, distanced themselves from the commitment.

Rayner last week accused the Tories of “wilfully misrepresenting” the party’s plans and said a debt amnesty had never been promised and was not in the party’s manifesto.

The education secretary, Justine Greening, said the party had “not been honest with young people” while the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said Labour had treated students as “election fodder”.