Badenoch criticised for ‘nonsensical’ plan to cut student numbers by 100,000 – UK politics live | Politics

The Conservatives are proposing to cut the number of students going to university so that they can save £3bn a year which they can spend on apprenticeships. This would double the apprenticeships budget.

In her speech, Kemi Badenoch will says she knows from personal experience the value of apprenticeships. She will say:

Nearly one in three graduates see no economic return, and every year taxpayers are writing off over £7bn in unpaid student loans.

Wasted money, wasted talent.

A rigged system propping up low-quality courses, while people can’t get high-quality apprenticeships that lead to real jobs.

This is personal for me.

A lot of people know I did two degrees.

One in engineering. One in law.

But while I can’t remember how to do parallel integration.

I can remember how to fix a broken computer.

Which I learnt on my apprenticeship.

We need more apprenticeships.

I was working with adults.

I was paying my own way.

And it gave me self confidence in a way my university degrees never did.

And unlike my subsequent university degree, I wasn’t still paying off my debts in my early 30s.

Spending on apprenticeships is popular with voters. That is one reason why Keir Starmer also used his party conference speech to announce a tilt in higher and further education policy, giving apprenticeships more priority.

Labour says the Tories have no credibility on this topic. This is what the party said about the Badenoch plan briefed overnight. A Labour spokesperson said:

Kemi Badenoch’s pledge isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Under the Tories, apprenticeship starts and completions collapsed, and instead of supporting universities, they waged divisive culture wars – treating students as political pawns rather than investing in education for public good.

This Labour government has changed course. We’ve stabilised university finances and opened up access to apprenticeships for thousands more young people, with confirmed increases in starts over the past year.

Keir Starmer is on a visit to India. Speaking to reporters on the flight to Mumbai, he had time to take a swipe at Robert Jenrick.

Here are some pictures from the Starmer trip.

Good morning. Kemi Badenoch is giving her first main speech to a Conservative party conference as leader. There are many people who assume it will be her last.

(She did speak on Sunday, on her plan to leave the European convention on human rights [ECHR], but the Wednesday speech closing conference is always the biggie.)

The Tories face an existential challenge from Reform UK. While Badenoch has tried to differentiate the party from Reform UK, mainly be stressing her commitment to fiscal responsibility and cutting public spending, her main rival, Robert Jenrick, seems to be adopting the opposite approach – essentially adopting Nigel Farage’s outlook wholesale.

In her speech today Badenoch will announce a new economic “golden rule” that she will present as evidence that a Conservative government would bring down government borrowing. It is a policy that the Tories might have embraced in the era of David Cameron and George Osborne. But what is much more interesting is how Badenoch is, in many areas, trampling all over Cameron-era Conservatism. We’ve seen this in the decision to proposing leaving the ECHR, repealing the Climate Change Act (essentially Cameron legislation, passed by Gordon Brown, as Michael Heseltine pointed out yesterday) and slashing aid spending to its lowest level on record.

And in her speech today Badenoch will bury another Cameron policy. His government lifted the cap on the number of students allowed to go to unversity, which opened up higher education to more young people and led to university expansion. Today Badenoch will propose bringing it back, cutting the number of people going to university by around 100,000 a year.

In a news release explaining why, the Conservative party says:

While many young people still benefit from university, too many are being pushed towards a degree as the only route to success, even as evidence has mounted that for too many it leads to poor job prospects and high debt …

Analysis by the Institute of Fiscal Studies finds that “total returns [on going to university] will be negative for around 30% of both men and women”. Many graduates earn so little they never repay fully their student loans, leaving the taxpayer to cover over £7bn in unpaid debt every year in England alone …

We will protect the interests of taxpayers and students by introducing caps on funded courses that consistently lead to poor graduate outcomes. We will introduce controls on student numbers in specific subject groups, so the taxpayer is not left subsidising courses which are leading to low graduate earnings or limited career prospects …

Number controls would apply in every subject group, such as creative arts, languages or sports science, and would be progressively reduced in subject groups where we see the greatest losses for taxpayers and students. This would reduce the number of annual university places by approximately 100,000 and save over £3bn in loan repayment losses that are currently written off each year as public spending.

The Tories say they would use the savings to double apprenticeship funding.

The University and College Union has described this as “economically illiterate”. In a statement, Jo Grady, the UCU general secretary, said:

This is an economically illiterate policy; no country has ever grown by slashing university places. Nonsensical ideas such as this come as no surprise from the party that crashed the economy, and fortunately, have no hope of being enacted, as the Tories will not be winning an election anytime soon.

The way to deal with the student debt burden is through a return to public funding, this could be paid for with a wealth tax, so those who benefit the most from getting a degree contribute more.

Here is the timetable of events at the Conservative conference.

10am: Matt Vickers, deputy chair of the party, hosts a panel on the 2026 local elections.

10.30am: Mims Davies, the shadow Welsh secretary, Andrew Bowie, the shadow Scottish secretary, and Alex Burghart, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary speak on a panel about the governance of the UK.

11.15am: Kemi Badenoch delivers her speech.

Also today, Keir Starmer is on a visit in India. And this morning John Swinney, the Scottish first minister, is holding a press conference to mark the publication of a paper about independence.

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