New Labour MP Says Student Loan System Is "Broken"

Graduates face tens of thousands of pounds of student debt, with interest rates charged on top (Alamy)

Zoe Crowther

@zoenora6

After A-level results day on Thursday, hundreds of thousands of UK students have got confirmation of where they will be heading for their university studies in Autumn. However, while Roca praised the UK’s “amazing” higher education sector, he said the loan system is “not fair” on young people.

The average student debt for students who started their course in the UK in 2022-23 is £45,600, according to the Student Loans Company (SLC). Since the 2012 student loan plan was implemented by the coalition government, most graduates have also been faced with interest rates of Retail Price Index (RPI) plus up to 3 per cent depending on income.

Roca, who previously worked for King's College London and the University of Westminster, told PoliticsHome the student loans mechanism is “broken”.

In 2007/08, he served as the President of Lancaster University Students' Union (LUSU), where fellow new Labour MP Michael Payne then succeeded him for two terms between 2008 and 2010.

As the student union president, Roca protested against the introduction of top-up tuition fees, where students faced variable fees to make up for the shortfall in funding the cost of certain degrees.

“I wasn't a fan of tuition fees at all,” he said.

"I joined the Labour Party while I was at university. I did have a tendency to march against my own party when I was at university, or certainly not agree with everything my party said. Tuition fees being an example. 

“We always said top-up fees were the thin end of the wedge, that it would be the beginning of something as fees. It was just an argument of ‘we need to invest more, we'll just charge people a little bit’. Then we had the coalition come in with the whole thing – but the movement to commercial rates of interest, it's not a soft loan.”

Roca said that he knew some “new young MPs” who he expects to “start to bang the drum on this”, and added that “in an ideal world, I would like our education to be free”.

“But we are where we are, and that's why the government will have a big job on its hands in fixing the problems that it's inherited. The mechanism is broken, and simply blaming international students without coming up with a solution is unfair. I'm really worried about the level of debt we're heaping on young people.

“This is partly about intergenerational fairness: it really depresses me that we have a situation where people come out of university, they're loaded with debt. It's commercial levels of interest that we're asking them to pay.

“We're then asking them to save for a deposit if they want to own their own home in a housing market that's also broken. God forbid, that young person might want to get married to somebody they love, which is a lot of cost being loaded up on a generation very early in life, and it's not fair and it isn't working.”

He added that as society as a whole gets the “reward” from having a university-educated workforce, it was only fair that the taxpayer “has to put in its dime”.

The new Labour government has a myriad of problems to solve in the education sector, with around 40 per cent of UK universities facing budget deficits this year. Industry leaders have warned that a fall in international student numbers triggered by the last Tory government tightening visa rules risks putting further pressure on university finances.

“We've got this amazing sector and it's been effectively placed in a straitjacket by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, with a unit of resource that's not grown with inflation, with policy decisions around immigration that have really damaged the sector and made it unattractive,” Roca said.

“It's important for us to have a thriving HE sector, but at the moment, we're in the worst of all possible worlds where it is not being funded properly, and the mechanism that was created to fund it is broken.”

Roca was also the former deputy leader of Westminster Council between 2022 and 2024, with responsibility for children’s services, before becoming the first Labour MP to represent Macclesfield in the seat's history when he unseated the Conservatives on 4 July.

“Education and Children's Services became really important to me, and we introduced free school meals for children between the ages of three and 14 universally, which I was really, really proud of,” he said.

Having been elected as MP for the town he grew up in, Roca now has a huge backlog of constituency casework to work through, which consists of many cases relating to schools and support for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

"All MPs are panicking about it... well, we're all trying to get moving as quickly as possible to serve our constituents," he said.

The Macclesfield MP is part of the F40 group, a collection of members of some of the most underfunded education authorities in the country, with per pupil funding in his area significantly lower than in other neighbouring authorities. 

Roca, along with others in the F40 group, will be looking to “unpick” why areas such as Macclesfield has lost out in the current funding formula.

“I hope to work with other MPs together about making sure the national funding formula continues to move in the direction it needs to to address those historic problems with underfunding,” Roca said, adding that it was also important to make sure that local authorities were being adequately supported.

“Local authorities are in a particularly bad place… they have had more and more duties placed on them with no money to come with it. That was a classic tactic of Conservative governments, to give councils more and more with no actual resource to deliver it. We want to make sure that we're devolving more power to local authorities and I hope that Cheshire is considered for a devolution deal.

“There's lots of things we can do in terms of power and devolution for local authorities, but unraveling SEND in education is a longer term thing. We've talked about a decade of national renewal; it's going to take several years to sort these things out properly.”

Asked by PoliticsHome whether he agreed with some Labour colleagues calling on the Government to scrap the two child benefit cap, Roca said that it was his understanding that it would be a “policy option in the future”. Roca was among the 363 MPs who voted to reject an amendment last month to immediately scrap the cap.

“My aim is to reduce child poverty,” he said.

“If removing the two child cap is a policy option that helps in doing that, I think the government should definitely consider it.”

As Macclesfield's first Labour MP, Roca was surprised by the number of votes he managed to secure last month – a majority of 9,120 against incumbent Tory MP David Rutley.

Explaining he wants to prove to people that “I’m going to be on their side”, he said he expects his maiden speech in the Commons in September to be focused on “public service”.

“It's been a bit of a whirlwind. During the campaign, I definitely thought we've got a real chance. I wasn't surprised by winning because I knew we had a shot from the polling, what surprised me was the majority – I thought that we would win by a little bit. 

“My fellow Labour MPs are absolutely lovely and have come from all sorts of backgrounds as well, which is phenomenal. It is a really diverse group in all sorts of wonderful ways: I'm a gay man, and I'm apparently now part of the largest LGBT cohort in any parliament in the world. So that's been pretty cool.

“I'm still on cloud nine. Two years ago, when I was the first ever Labour deputy leader of the City of Westminster, I thought it couldn't get better. Now I'm the first ever Labour MP for the area I grew up in. I'm really excited.”

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