Draft Lifelong Learning (Fee Limits) Regulations 2026
House of Commons · General Committees · 24 Jun 2026 · 34 speeches · Official Report
The Committee consisted of the following Members:
Chair: Graham Stringer
† Bloore, Chris (Redditch) (Lab)
† Buckley, Julia (Shrewsbury) (Lab)
† Dewhirst, Charlie (Bridlington and The Wolds) (Con)
† Dickson, Jim (Dartford) (Lab)
† Evans, Chris (Caerphilly) (Lab/Co-op)
† Foody, Emma (Cramlington and Killingworth) (Lab/Co-op)
† Fox, Sir Ashley (Bridgwater) (Con)
† Hinds, Damian (East Hampshire) (Con)
† MacAlister, Josh (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education)
Martin, Amanda (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
† Onn, Melanie (Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes) (Lab)
† Rankin, Jack (Windsor) (Con)
† Sabine, Anna (Frome and East Somerset) (LD)
† Sollom, Ian (St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire) (LD)
† Stone, Will (Swindon North) (Lab)
† Strickland, Alan (Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor) (Lab)
† Yang, Yuan (Earley and Woodley) (Lab)
Emma Elson, Committee Clerk
† attended the Committee
Seventh Delegated Legislation Committee
Wednesday 24 June 2026
[Graham Stringer in the Chair ]
Draft Lifelong Learning (Fee Limits) Regulations 2026
The Chair
Before I call the Minister to move the motion, any hon. Member or official who wishes to take off their jacket has my permission to do so.
I beg to move, That the Committee has considered the draft Lifelong Learning (Fee Limits) Regulations 2026. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. The draft regulations were laid before the House on 18 May. This statutory instrument is the first of three pieces of secondary legislation needed to implement the lifelong learning entitlement, or LLE, which establishes a new system of tuition fee limits for higher education courses and modules that begin on or after 1 January 2027. The LLE is a major reform to student finance, creating a single flexible funding system for levels 4 to 6 across further and higher education. It will support people to learn, upskill and retrain throughout their working lives, and will deliver one of the core commitments in our post-16 education and skills White Paper, underpinning the growth and skills missions. The concept of a lifelong learning entitlement stems from the recommendations made by Sir Philip Augar’s independent panel to the post-18 education and funding review back in 2019. Primary legislation enacted in 2022 and 2023 by the previous Government established the framework, and these regulations are the next step in delivering it-this is a true cross-party effort. The regulations set out how tuition fee limits will apply under the LLE. A tuition fee limit is the maximum amount that a provider can charge per year if it is subject to a fee cap. Currently, that limit is £9,790 for standard full-time courses. Those...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I thank the Minister for introducing the debate. His Majesty’s most loyal Opposition will support the regulations. Giving people the chance to access education and training flexibly throughout their working lives supports social mobility and personal aspiration, and helps employers to secure the skills that they need. That is why we Conservatives are proud that the previous Government supported the independent Augar review recommendations and introduced the primary legislation necessary to create a single lifelong learning loan allowance that learners can use to upskill and retrain flexibly over their working lives. We therefore support the principle behind the lifelong learning entitlement and the move to a credit-based system for calculating tuition fee limits. I would like to press the Minister on the importance of face-to-face teaching time. If we want to tackle low-quality provision and ensure that the lifelong learning entitlement lives up to our hopes, we must ensure that learners receive the highest-quality teaching possible. Too often, students receive limited face-to-face teaching time, limited supervision and a higher education experience that falls short of what they were promised. Learners who enrol in the modular courses and training that will become available from January next year will reasonably expect to be able to ask their teacher a question, and to interact with their fellow students, in...
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. The Lib Dems have long supported the principle of a flexible credit-based system that lets people study in smaller chunks across their working lives, rather than in one fixed block at 18 years old. We are glad to see that direction reflected here today. I am afraid we cannot endorse the instrument, however, for reasons that I will put on the record. The first reason is substantive. The instrument, and the package that it leads, relies entirely on a loan-based model to drive take-up among exactly the cohort it claims to serve-adults who are already in work, with mortgages, dependants and a shorter working life over which to repay any loan. A loan that looks like a reasonable proposition for an 18-year-old starting a three-year degree looks very different to a 45-year-old weighing up retraining against existing financial commitments. When that issue was raised directly in the other place during the passage of the enabling legislation in 2023, the Government’s response was essentially to defer the question to the detail. The instrument is that detail, but the question has not really been answered. The Department’s 2021 pilot of loan-funded short courses, run jointly with the Office for Students, planned for more than 100 courses and 2,000 students, but only 17 courses launched and 125 students enrolled, of whom just 41 took out a loan. That direct, real-world test of the model that this instrument now extends across...
We all knew that!
Well, I am a mathematician by trade. It is a small point, but every fee limit in the system is derived from that per-credit calculation, so will the Minister confirm the correct rounding convention, and that the providers and the Student Loans Company are working from the same figure? We support the direction of this reform, and will not stand in its way today, but the loan-only design and the inadequate scrutiny afforded to the two follow-on instruments are real concerns. I hope that the Minister will address them.
Like everyone who has spoken, I support the principle of the lifelong learning entitlement. I welcomed it in Sir Philip Augar’s review, which reported while I was at the Department for Education. I was pleased that it was brought in by my erstwhile right hon. Friends for Chichester and Harlow. It is true that higher education in this country has been too rigid for too long. The lifelong learning entitlement eliminates the “do it now or do it never” problem. It makes the most of talent, and it means that people can move into growing sectors in the economy, or just new areas of interest, and learn what they need to learn. For all those reasons, it is also good for productivity. This statutory instrument is not about the existence of the lifelong learning entitlement, nor is it about the existence-or the level-of the fee; it is just about the modularisation of that fee. I have a couple of short questions to put to the Minister. The first touches on what the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire was just saying: there is a question of debt aversion. That did not happen, as was widely predicted, after the Vince Cable reforms in the early 2010s-the great risk of debt aversion among young people did not turn out to be true. However, this is mostly about an older demographic, with different sets of responsibilities, at a different life stage. What research has been done about that? I wonder whether the Minister might say a word about the levels of enrolment in the pilots...
I thank Committee members for their contributions to the debate. I will endeavour to answer as many questions as I can. The first set of questions came from the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Windsor, about face-to-face teaching. The system allows for credit funding flexibility, which is down to providers, but I recognise the importance of face-to-face teaching. That is one of the reasons why, earlier this week, my noble Friend the Minister for Skills set out the intention to link the outcomes of the teaching excellence framework scores to future access to fee increases. That is why, over different Governments, we have built a system that allows competition so that students can pick and select from a range of providers and, in essence, shop around for the best option. Greater visibility of the quality is important, and that should come from the teaching excellence framework. A number of Members asked about the various impacts of the changes. Impact assessments have been published as part of this process. I will ask for copies of them to be sent to Members in the coming days. I hope that they will answer a number of questions. The hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire and I have had several exchanges about student finance and student funding. I have a great deal of affection for the Liberal Democrats, but it is a system that was partly designed by them in office. His Majesty’s Opposition had affection for the Liberal Democrats at a certain point in...
Committee rose .