Theresa May’s fightback: a pin drop, not a bang
The Prime Minister must be bolder if she is to help young people and remain in Downing Street herself.
Theresa May has started her fightback, says former Conservative MP for Bath Ben Howlett in a tweet. He was commenting on the Prime Minister’s newspaper interview with the Telegraph, in which she promised to help out struggling young people with a wealth of new policies. Capping tuition fees at their current level of £9,250 a year in England, increasing the threshold at which people start paying their loans back to an income of £25,000 per year, and extending and increasing the funding of the Help To Buy scheme were all policies that slipped off Theresa May’s tongue as she prepares to relaunch her leadership and party at its conference from Sunday onwards.
All three of those policies are somewhat welcome, technocratic promises that will begin Theresa May’s come back. They show the beginning of an agenda that does want to help young people get on the housing ladder and deal with student debt. But what they don’t show is any full throated vision of how to accomplish that further, and also a lack of a comprehensive plan to help people in Theresa May’s remaining months or years in office. If the Prime Minister wants to save herself, she must be more radical first of all in her speech to the Conservative Party Conference on Wednesday, and secondly in everything she does between now and the end of her tenure.
What does May actually need to offer?
The Prime Minister must surely recognise the problems of these policies. To begin, they are welcome, needed, but weak. The increase in funding for the Help To Buy scheme ignores the market forces of the housing market and will drive housing costs up, making it more expensive both for home buyers and renters in the future. It is needed action for first-time buyers in the short term, but is not a solution to the country’s housing crisis. That must be fixed by reducing planning regulations and pushing developers to build, but Government must also build a mixture of affordable and social housing itself to alleviate the current crisis.
Theresa May could have easily made this a big announcement on housing, which would have also helped and appealed to the 18–45 year olds that the Conservative Party desperately needs to win over in the coming years. Help To Buy, coupled with a house-building program and a re-invigorated Right To Buy that would see the benefits reach not just middle income families, but young people and those who rely on the social housing sector. Theresa May has the opportunity now to show she means business on housing. She says she doesn’t care about her portrayal and wants to help people, well the Government intervening and building more houses itself is one of the single biggest ways she could do so.
May has shown herself to not be an ideological ballhawk about Government action and intervention, and so there is little explanation as to why the Prime Minister hasn’t yet gone further. May’s tuition fee reforms, however, are the real issue of her new policy package. While the increase in the personal income repayment threshold is long overdue, the cap on the price of tuition fees at £9,250 for the next academic year simply reminds people that tuition fees are now even higher than they were just two years ago, does little to help people actually going to university and allows Jeremy Corbyn’s playbook to be put into force. Just take a look at Labour MP Luke Pollard’s tweet for an example.
“So your choice is annual tuition fees of £9,250 with the Conservatives or annual tuition fees of £0 with Labour.”
— Luke Pollard MP
This move plays right into the Labour Party’s hands in that it doesn’t go as far and isn’t as radical as Labour’s proposals. Why vote Conservative to reduce the amount you need to pay when Labour will abolish payment altogether? May needs to move on from this and come up with some better proposals. One such idea would be the idea of graduate tax, which she could order Education Secretary Justine Greening to undertake. Housing and maintenance loans are also key issues, with the majority of young women (not just students) needing to resort to overdrafts to make ends meet.
A graduate and youth rate of income tax or national insurance contributions would be one way to equal the playing field immediately for young people when they first enter the labour market. these are all workable proposals that Theresa May could push, as is the idea of a special savings rate for students and under 25s who should be encouraged to begin saving for later on in life, with the higher maintenance loans making this easier. The abolishing of Maintenance Grants by the Conservatives serves the purpose of ensuring higher loans are repaid not by those that always come from the poorest background, but by those that go on to earn more. It recognises the meritocratic nature of universities and what they offer people.
There are good routes where Theresa May can take her new policies, big ideas and new-found optimism and mission. But these ideas are not fully laid out yet, her vision is not clear to anyone yet and her Party’s Conference begins in earnest tomorrow. She must make sure it is a success, and the Prime Minister must be bolder if she is to help young people and remain in Downing Street herself.
