Yeah, a mortgage you’re supposed to be able to pay off within your working life. Student loans are a millstone by design.
Oh, also, the terms of mortgages aren’t typically altered by the lender after the fact…
HighNimpact on
“It’s not like a mortgage”
Yeah, because if it were then the terms would be illegal under the Consumer Credit Act. The government has manipulated children into taking on lifetimes of debt on terms that a private bank would be legally prevented from applying because the terms are so unreasonable.
Only_Tip9560 on
No it is like a 30 year pay cut where the debt is still larger than it was when you started so has to be covered by the tax payer anyway. Absolutely fucking stupid system.
AccomplishedAct5364 on
Student loans are lifetime ninja taxes for anyone born poor who wishes to escape poverty.
Get your degree, earn 40k and you earn less than a rich kid who also earns 40k because his parents could afford the costs.
Tada – second class citizens are now “grateful” for the opportunity to have a lifetime “not born rich” stealth tax
AdPale1469 on
these people have literally no clue.
They had an easy life.
Education was free as it should be, and they entered the work place before the mass immigration of 2004 onwards.
Anybody turning 18 from 2006 onwards has been royally fucked by a bunch of out of touch clowns placing obstacles in the way of success, claiming:
“its easy i never had a problem”
You are the problem.
poke50uk on
What a terrible sound bite – I’m assuming to get clicks, but lets think this through then. A mortgage is something of real value which can be remortgaged or sold if needs must. A student loan is something you’re forever trapped in – but only if you were not rich enough to pay for university outright. A mortgage has very set terms and CHOICE – you can shop around, you can choose 2yr, 5yr, 10yr even, or just have it rolling, and set payback times. There is competition. There is a single student loans option which even in the time I’ve had a loan they SOLD THEM to another company. Mortgage is used to judge your affordability for other loans, because you have something that can be used against the loan if you don’t pay it back – so you can afford a car etc. Student loan reduces your monthly income, no guaranteed increase of wages (in fact, worse prospects now) so reduces how much mortgage and other loans you are allowed. Reducing your ability to get a home in the first place, increasing time with parents, decreasing time you have to have your own family, and can tell you now – reduced my family planning to the one child which I’m lucky to just be able to afford. I MUCH prefer my mortgage that my old student loan ffs.
burtvader on
Write off all current interest, make the rate 0% for all student loans. Have people pay back what they borrowed. I don’t care if the public purse loses out due to inflation. I paid mine off and feel it should be easier.
philipwhiuk on
How much was PPE at Oxford Jacqui?
Still paying graduate tax are you? No didn’t think so
KL_boy on
Unpopular take, but yes. It is an unsecured loan, with no guarantee asset so trying to secure this commercially would be even more expensive.
That is what the market is trying to do. Asking people if going to Uni is worth it vs say a trade.
If we want the gov to fund Uni, then it should be a more selective process, with less students going to Uni.
dandotcomhacked69 on
I do not understand why a system is in place which is effectively punishing those who seek higher education, unless that is the idea.
Either pay in full upfront, or suffer.
No_Neighborhood6856 on
My loan has now blown up to 50k and my monthly repayments aren’t hitting the interest.
I completely agree that it was mis-sold as it wasn’t explained clearly.
However, with that said, it bares no affect to my credit score or ability to get a mortgage. But I do appreciate that some people’s monthly repayment may affect their affordability.
I don’t see the financial benefit of making overpayments (aside from trying to reduce your monthly expenditure but this seems counterintuitive). Your better off making additional payments into an ISA or pension or just generic savings account.
It will get written off eventually.
Potential-Bird-5826 on
Rich person says poor people should suck it up and just pay, news at 11.
lukeyboyuk1989 on
Isn’t our main export services…Why would we not want to educate people so we can provide that service better?
I was plan 1 student and paid off my loan fortunately, I would happily pay a little more tax for our students to get tuition for free. I’m pretty happy to pay more tax for any reason if it makes our country better and is spent correctly. I’m not a 45% tax payer either.
CongealedBeanKingdom on
You’re right, it isn’t. It’s takes much, much longer to pay off a student loan.
Crowded-Wazzack on
I borrowed under £60k and have calculated that I will most likely pay back almost £200k around 1 year before it gets written off. Kill me.
wibbly-water on
Just make it a graduate tax at this point. I’d be happy to know I am contributing so that the future generations get to have an education like I did – rather than it being framed as personal burden going to some middleman company. It would be more honest too!
DD3566 on
Borrowed £50,000 for my tuition and maintenance (London Uni) and graduated in July 2017, started work in September 2017. I’ve paid back £14,200 since then but I now owe SLC £64,000…
If that’s not an unfair deal I’m not sure what else is
Substantial_Taro_830 on
I was educated in a country where university is fully paid for by the taxpayer and to be honest it is really completely uncontroversial there. Like nobody, even on the far right, is seriously arguing they should do it differently.
Everyone there agrees that an educated population is a) necessary for democracy to function as you need all social classes to understand policies, and b) key to a prosperous 21st century economy which is mainly built on exporting goods and services demanding high skills.
AverageToAverage on
Everyone needs to be pushing this constantly. It’s the first time it seemingly has any real spotlight on it. Don’t let the focus shift.
Write to your MP’s. Sign petitions. Join groups focused on pushing change through. It’s not impossible but will take a lot of work.
anonnymouse2025 on
An educated population is a benefit to the country, particularly when critical thinking skills are increasingly necessary due to disinformation and AI. It should be encouraged not prohibitively expensive
Clear_Painting1453 on
I find it funny that a rumoured 2% tax rise in the last budget may have been enough to ‘bring the government down’.
Yet I’m here paying 9% more than a lot of my peers on anything I earn over minimum wage.
McLeod3577 on
Crazy thing is, I’ve seen loan amounts that are greater than what my first house cost in the late 90s
Very_Bad_Ebening on
If nothing is going to change from this then I hope the spotlight will help others look for alternatives abroad. It seems the only lesson young people can take as successive governments refuse to make things better for them. Let them prop up the Higher education system by importing more and more foreign students until its no longer sustainable, thats the only way they’ll learn.
sjw_7 on
Its massively unfair to saddle our younger generation with huge levels of debt before they have even properly entered the work force.
University education should be free for UK citizens. Its fine to charge overseas students for the service but not for people from here. Scotland manages to do it so why cant the rest of the UK?
Rpqz on
She’s right. In 6 years, making the minimum payment on both, I will have repaid £16,000 on my mortgage, my student loan will grow by £26,500 in the same period.
6 years is significant as its the point where I’ll owe less on my home than I do on my degree.
BaBeBaBeBooby on
It’s a graduate tax not intended to ever be repaid. The govt was selling off these loans for pennies in the pound knowing the majority will never be repaid.
PatienceIsMore on
Usual political detached from the reality of a young person.
1. It is a mortgage style loan, although unsecured
2. It counts towards affordability checks when you take out a mortgage
3. You’re locked into a single supplier with an uncompetitive rate
OrignalSauce on
I’m sure someone has done the maths but does the current loan system work out for providers?
Say I’m the average (median, mean whatever works better). Do the companies providing the loan still make a great return on the initial loan of say 36k from me?
So basically does my 30 years of repayments make more than the 36k original even if at the end they wipe off another 30k of unpaid amounts.
dazb84 on
Fallacy of relative privation (also known as “appeal to worse problems” or “not as bad as”) – dismissing an argument or complaint due to what are perceived to be more important problems.
We need a public service fallacy bot for all political communications.
homeinthecity on
Love that they’ve got people out defending this. It’ll only make people more annoyed than if they left it.
ExoneratedPhoenix on
It is never used against you in any credit system, so theoretically you could owe £400 trillion and still get a car loan or mortgage.
But this adds to its absurdity. What has happened is Universities can no longer get enough money from these fees unless they are hiked up massively, which then is given as debt, which then is mathematically impossible to pay off.
This is just money printing with extra steps. The student loan debt is massive, and majority of it will never be paid off, but if enough graduates have an extra 9% on their tax rate basically, it gradually pays it off. The actual figure is just a ball on the chain, the balls size is irrelevant, the point is it’s a fixed 9% tax they will never be free from. The maths even shows this impossibility.
I was extremely lucky and was on Plan 1, and didn’t borrow the maximum, and even I took 15 years to pay it off, half that time as a higher tax payer.
1. Public would be in uproar of 30% basic rate.
2. Make most jobs locked behind a degree.
3. Make 9% payment on it
4. Tax is 20% +9% loan charge, ergo tax is 29%.
It’s just a “well ackshually, it isn’t tax”. It is. It is all put into a giant pot in the end. Same with NI – it doesn’t go straight to NHS. It is put into a central pot and divvied as needed.
If we add everything together, Britains taxrate is close to 60-70% in total, when adding all base taxes. Adding VAT and council etc we start to see close to 90%.
Literally the government takes most of what people earn anyway, and nothing still works.
Good luck.
Sensitive-Cap-3412 on
There was an article last week saying that 2/3 people with a student loan aren’t even paying off the interest each year so their loan is just going to accumulate forever until written off. So yeah, she’s right, that’s not like a mortgage because a bank has to do due dilligence before handing it out so if said bank had 2/3 people with a mortgage not paying off their interest…. that bank would be in trouble whereas SLC just gets the public to write it off.
Dramatic-Ad-4607 on
Out of touch upper class gated community type strikes again.
These people really do not have a clue about the real world. I’m 31 and my age group has struggled over the years but nowhere near those younger than me. There is 0 future for them and people like this who don’t understand the real world are the reason for that.
Mharus on
Genuine question; are Labour trying their absolute hardest to not get re-elected?
Next_Replacement_566 on
With a mortgage you have a physical product at the end
Enraged-walnut on
It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t keep altering the terms after the fact or have the interest rate so high it’s become an income stream for them. If they want to make it equitable then there are plenty of other models out there. E.g. the New Zealand system, loan as normal and you repay in a similar way, however the loan is interest free so long as you remain living and working in the country. Other than an annual admin fee to help cover the costs of the system. The catch is though that the loan value isn’t wiped off after so many years. If you then go and move abroad/work etc then that’s when you start paying interest. If I recall correctly non payment can result in criminal charges being brought against you, certainly you get detained at the border if you try to re-enter.
alexmlb3598 on
Inflation added £23,000 to my student loan in 4.5yrs (since Sept ’21). To repay that interest, I would have to go straight into a graduate/entry-level job earning about £87,000 a year. That’s not to bring my loan balance down, that’s to keep it level.
Even if the thresholds weren’t frozen, basically no grad is going into a job paying almost £90k/yr. The interest rate being general inflation *plus 3%* is toxic, and it makes all of us worse off.
The Government (both Tory/LD, Tory, and Labour) have changed the goalposts on numerous occasions. We agreed to a plan that said the thresholds would increase year-on-year, and they’ve been frozen more than they’ve been changed. Not acceptable!
recursant on
Students should pay more because a degree allows them to earn more. So let’s set the threshold for repayment at … less than the average wage.
Makes perfect sense.
panguy87 on
I suggest that if enough aggrieved people can get together and contact a solicitor, they’d have a good chance of taking a class action claim against the SLC
WhatsFunf on
People need to start talking in absolute numbers.
I’m in my late-30s and studied engineering.
If I were on the current student loan system but with my lived career, I would now be paying £550 per month from my take-home income, **AND THAT WOULD ONLY PAY THE INTEREST.**
carucath on
Based on her age she probably didn’t even have a student loan! Until Tony Blair it was a grant!!!
m1ndwipe on
“It’s not like a mortgage because if the terms changed unilaterally like we did with the repayment thresholds the FSA would come down on a mortgage broker like a ton of bricks.”
Sufficient-Star-1237 on
The UK government sold the debt to private organizations
The first loans which were introduced in 1990 were known as ‘mortgage –style’ loans, these loans were superseded in September 1998 by income-contingent loans.
The entire mortgage-style loan book has been sold off to private investors as a result of three separate sales which took place between 1998 and 2013. UK government raised approximately £2.9 billion from the initial sale of two portfolios of mortgage-style (MS) student loans in 1998 and 1999, which had a face value of just over £2 billion. A final batch of these loans with a face value of £890 million was sold in 2013 for £160 million.
“In February 2017 it was announced that a sale would go ahead and the first sale of income contingent loans was completed in December 2017. The sale covered loans issued by English local authorities that entered repayment between 2002 and 2006. The sale achieved £1.7 billion from 1.2 million loans with a face value of £3.5 billion held by over 400,000 borrowers. This represented a write off of 51 per cent of the face value of the loans.
A second sale of a tranche of Plan 1 loans that entered repayment between 2007 and 2009 was completed in December 2018. The sale was of loans with a total face value of around £3.9bn and achieved £1.9bn.”
SkepticalBelieverr on
They aren’t gonna let their extra tax go. Once again a generation is getting screwed to pay for one that have their wealth
DI-Try on
I work in the NHS. Due to wage compression (minimum wage going up and higher earners not) I’m sure once you account student loan, UC and professional registration fees (let alone 3-5 years of lost earnings) I’m pretty sure people 2 bands lower then me are taking home more.
afrophysicist on
No, it’s much worse than a mortgage.
Barclays doesn’t get to say to me “you’ve got a pay rise, so I’m going to add 2% onto your interest rate”
Marzipan_civil on
Top up fees (or whatever they are called now) are the unfair part. Prior to 2006, students only needed maintenance loans. Fees had to be paid up front, but were means tested and were “only” about £1000 anyway. Maintenance loan was about £3000 at that time (this wasn’t actually enough to live on, but part time jobs were possibly easier to find)
So somebody who graduated around 2005 would have maybe £10,000 of student debt. Student loans are not the unfair part.
It’s the “pay your fees with loans, so that we can charge higher fees” part that is unfair and predatory. Encouraging 18 year olds to take on so much debt on the promise of higher earnings? In some cases, it would be better to have gone straight into a job from school, even if your starting wage was less, you wouldn’t have a mountain of debt over your head.
soggyarsonist on
I don’t really understand why they’re defending an obviously broken system. It took me 20 years to pay mine off and I was on the original low interest loan and graduated with something like £9-10k debt.
Even if they haven’t got the fiscal room to do anything about it just be honest and admit it’s a bad system but it can’t be addressed into the fiscal situation has improved.
48 Comments
> “It’s not like a mortgage”
Yeah, a mortgage you’re supposed to be able to pay off within your working life. Student loans are a millstone by design.
Oh, also, the terms of mortgages aren’t typically altered by the lender after the fact…
“It’s not like a mortgage”
Yeah, because if it were then the terms would be illegal under the Consumer Credit Act. The government has manipulated children into taking on lifetimes of debt on terms that a private bank would be legally prevented from applying because the terms are so unreasonable.
No it is like a 30 year pay cut where the debt is still larger than it was when you started so has to be covered by the tax payer anyway. Absolutely fucking stupid system.
Student loans are lifetime ninja taxes for anyone born poor who wishes to escape poverty.
Get your degree, earn 40k and you earn less than a rich kid who also earns 40k because his parents could afford the costs.
Tada – second class citizens are now “grateful” for the opportunity to have a lifetime “not born rich” stealth tax
these people have literally no clue.
They had an easy life.
Education was free as it should be, and they entered the work place before the mass immigration of 2004 onwards.
Anybody turning 18 from 2006 onwards has been royally fucked by a bunch of out of touch clowns placing obstacles in the way of success, claiming:
“its easy i never had a problem”
You are the problem.
What a terrible sound bite – I’m assuming to get clicks, but lets think this through then. A mortgage is something of real value which can be remortgaged or sold if needs must. A student loan is something you’re forever trapped in – but only if you were not rich enough to pay for university outright. A mortgage has very set terms and CHOICE – you can shop around, you can choose 2yr, 5yr, 10yr even, or just have it rolling, and set payback times. There is competition. There is a single student loans option which even in the time I’ve had a loan they SOLD THEM to another company. Mortgage is used to judge your affordability for other loans, because you have something that can be used against the loan if you don’t pay it back – so you can afford a car etc. Student loan reduces your monthly income, no guaranteed increase of wages (in fact, worse prospects now) so reduces how much mortgage and other loans you are allowed. Reducing your ability to get a home in the first place, increasing time with parents, decreasing time you have to have your own family, and can tell you now – reduced my family planning to the one child which I’m lucky to just be able to afford. I MUCH prefer my mortgage that my old student loan ffs.
Write off all current interest, make the rate 0% for all student loans. Have people pay back what they borrowed. I don’t care if the public purse loses out due to inflation. I paid mine off and feel it should be easier.
How much was PPE at Oxford Jacqui?
Still paying graduate tax are you? No didn’t think so
Unpopular take, but yes. It is an unsecured loan, with no guarantee asset so trying to secure this commercially would be even more expensive.
That is what the market is trying to do. Asking people if going to Uni is worth it vs say a trade.
If we want the gov to fund Uni, then it should be a more selective process, with less students going to Uni.
I do not understand why a system is in place which is effectively punishing those who seek higher education, unless that is the idea.
Either pay in full upfront, or suffer.
My loan has now blown up to 50k and my monthly repayments aren’t hitting the interest.
I completely agree that it was mis-sold as it wasn’t explained clearly.
However, with that said, it bares no affect to my credit score or ability to get a mortgage. But I do appreciate that some people’s monthly repayment may affect their affordability.
I don’t see the financial benefit of making overpayments (aside from trying to reduce your monthly expenditure but this seems counterintuitive). Your better off making additional payments into an ISA or pension or just generic savings account.
It will get written off eventually.
Rich person says poor people should suck it up and just pay, news at 11.
Isn’t our main export services…Why would we not want to educate people so we can provide that service better?
I was plan 1 student and paid off my loan fortunately, I would happily pay a little more tax for our students to get tuition for free. I’m pretty happy to pay more tax for any reason if it makes our country better and is spent correctly. I’m not a 45% tax payer either.
You’re right, it isn’t. It’s takes much, much longer to pay off a student loan.
I borrowed under £60k and have calculated that I will most likely pay back almost £200k around 1 year before it gets written off. Kill me.
Just make it a graduate tax at this point. I’d be happy to know I am contributing so that the future generations get to have an education like I did – rather than it being framed as personal burden going to some middleman company. It would be more honest too!
Borrowed £50,000 for my tuition and maintenance (London Uni) and graduated in July 2017, started work in September 2017. I’ve paid back £14,200 since then but I now owe SLC £64,000…
If that’s not an unfair deal I’m not sure what else is
I was educated in a country where university is fully paid for by the taxpayer and to be honest it is really completely uncontroversial there. Like nobody, even on the far right, is seriously arguing they should do it differently.
Everyone there agrees that an educated population is a) necessary for democracy to function as you need all social classes to understand policies, and b) key to a prosperous 21st century economy which is mainly built on exporting goods and services demanding high skills.
Everyone needs to be pushing this constantly. It’s the first time it seemingly has any real spotlight on it. Don’t let the focus shift.
Write to your MP’s. Sign petitions. Join groups focused on pushing change through. It’s not impossible but will take a lot of work.
An educated population is a benefit to the country, particularly when critical thinking skills are increasingly necessary due to disinformation and AI. It should be encouraged not prohibitively expensive
I find it funny that a rumoured 2% tax rise in the last budget may have been enough to ‘bring the government down’.
Yet I’m here paying 9% more than a lot of my peers on anything I earn over minimum wage.
Crazy thing is, I’ve seen loan amounts that are greater than what my first house cost in the late 90s
If nothing is going to change from this then I hope the spotlight will help others look for alternatives abroad. It seems the only lesson young people can take as successive governments refuse to make things better for them. Let them prop up the Higher education system by importing more and more foreign students until its no longer sustainable, thats the only way they’ll learn.
Its massively unfair to saddle our younger generation with huge levels of debt before they have even properly entered the work force.
University education should be free for UK citizens. Its fine to charge overseas students for the service but not for people from here. Scotland manages to do it so why cant the rest of the UK?
She’s right. In 6 years, making the minimum payment on both, I will have repaid £16,000 on my mortgage, my student loan will grow by £26,500 in the same period.
6 years is significant as its the point where I’ll owe less on my home than I do on my degree.
It’s a graduate tax not intended to ever be repaid. The govt was selling off these loans for pennies in the pound knowing the majority will never be repaid.
Usual political detached from the reality of a young person.
1. It is a mortgage style loan, although unsecured
2. It counts towards affordability checks when you take out a mortgage
3. You’re locked into a single supplier with an uncompetitive rate
I’m sure someone has done the maths but does the current loan system work out for providers?
Say I’m the average (median, mean whatever works better). Do the companies providing the loan still make a great return on the initial loan of say 36k from me?
So basically does my 30 years of repayments make more than the 36k original even if at the end they wipe off another 30k of unpaid amounts.
Fallacy of relative privation (also known as “appeal to worse problems” or “not as bad as”) – dismissing an argument or complaint due to what are perceived to be more important problems.
We need a public service fallacy bot for all political communications.
Love that they’ve got people out defending this. It’ll only make people more annoyed than if they left it.
It is never used against you in any credit system, so theoretically you could owe £400 trillion and still get a car loan or mortgage.
But this adds to its absurdity. What has happened is Universities can no longer get enough money from these fees unless they are hiked up massively, which then is given as debt, which then is mathematically impossible to pay off.
This is just money printing with extra steps. The student loan debt is massive, and majority of it will never be paid off, but if enough graduates have an extra 9% on their tax rate basically, it gradually pays it off. The actual figure is just a ball on the chain, the balls size is irrelevant, the point is it’s a fixed 9% tax they will never be free from. The maths even shows this impossibility.
I was extremely lucky and was on Plan 1, and didn’t borrow the maximum, and even I took 15 years to pay it off, half that time as a higher tax payer.
1. Public would be in uproar of 30% basic rate.
2. Make most jobs locked behind a degree.
3. Make 9% payment on it
4. Tax is 20% +9% loan charge, ergo tax is 29%.
It’s just a “well ackshually, it isn’t tax”. It is. It is all put into a giant pot in the end. Same with NI – it doesn’t go straight to NHS. It is put into a central pot and divvied as needed.
If we add everything together, Britains taxrate is close to 60-70% in total, when adding all base taxes. Adding VAT and council etc we start to see close to 90%.
Literally the government takes most of what people earn anyway, and nothing still works.
Good luck.
There was an article last week saying that 2/3 people with a student loan aren’t even paying off the interest each year so their loan is just going to accumulate forever until written off. So yeah, she’s right, that’s not like a mortgage because a bank has to do due dilligence before handing it out so if said bank had 2/3 people with a mortgage not paying off their interest…. that bank would be in trouble whereas SLC just gets the public to write it off.
Out of touch upper class gated community type strikes again.
These people really do not have a clue about the real world. I’m 31 and my age group has struggled over the years but nowhere near those younger than me. There is 0 future for them and people like this who don’t understand the real world are the reason for that.
Genuine question; are Labour trying their absolute hardest to not get re-elected?
With a mortgage you have a physical product at the end
It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t keep altering the terms after the fact or have the interest rate so high it’s become an income stream for them. If they want to make it equitable then there are plenty of other models out there. E.g. the New Zealand system, loan as normal and you repay in a similar way, however the loan is interest free so long as you remain living and working in the country. Other than an annual admin fee to help cover the costs of the system. The catch is though that the loan value isn’t wiped off after so many years. If you then go and move abroad/work etc then that’s when you start paying interest. If I recall correctly non payment can result in criminal charges being brought against you, certainly you get detained at the border if you try to re-enter.
Inflation added £23,000 to my student loan in 4.5yrs (since Sept ’21). To repay that interest, I would have to go straight into a graduate/entry-level job earning about £87,000 a year. That’s not to bring my loan balance down, that’s to keep it level.
Even if the thresholds weren’t frozen, basically no grad is going into a job paying almost £90k/yr. The interest rate being general inflation *plus 3%* is toxic, and it makes all of us worse off.
The Government (both Tory/LD, Tory, and Labour) have changed the goalposts on numerous occasions. We agreed to a plan that said the thresholds would increase year-on-year, and they’ve been frozen more than they’ve been changed. Not acceptable!
Students should pay more because a degree allows them to earn more. So let’s set the threshold for repayment at … less than the average wage.
Makes perfect sense.
I suggest that if enough aggrieved people can get together and contact a solicitor, they’d have a good chance of taking a class action claim against the SLC
People need to start talking in absolute numbers.
I’m in my late-30s and studied engineering.
If I were on the current student loan system but with my lived career, I would now be paying £550 per month from my take-home income, **AND THAT WOULD ONLY PAY THE INTEREST.**
Based on her age she probably didn’t even have a student loan! Until Tony Blair it was a grant!!!
“It’s not like a mortgage because if the terms changed unilaterally like we did with the repayment thresholds the FSA would come down on a mortgage broker like a ton of bricks.”
The UK government sold the debt to private organizations
The first loans which were introduced in 1990 were known as ‘mortgage –style’ loans, these loans were superseded in September 1998 by income-contingent loans.
The entire mortgage-style loan book has been sold off to private investors as a result of three separate sales which took place between 1998 and 2013. UK government raised approximately £2.9 billion from the initial sale of two portfolios of mortgage-style (MS) student loans in 1998 and 1999, which had a face value of just over £2 billion. A final batch of these loans with a face value of £890 million was sold in 2013 for £160 million.
“In February 2017 it was announced that a sale would go ahead and the first sale of income contingent loans was completed in December 2017. The sale covered loans issued by English local authorities that entered repayment between 2002 and 2006. The sale achieved £1.7 billion from 1.2 million loans with a face value of £3.5 billion held by over 400,000 borrowers. This represented a write off of 51 per cent of the face value of the loans.
A second sale of a tranche of Plan 1 loans that entered repayment between 2007 and 2009 was completed in December 2018. The sale was of loans with a total face value of around £3.9bn and achieved £1.9bn.”
They aren’t gonna let their extra tax go. Once again a generation is getting screwed to pay for one that have their wealth
I work in the NHS. Due to wage compression (minimum wage going up and higher earners not) I’m sure once you account student loan, UC and professional registration fees (let alone 3-5 years of lost earnings) I’m pretty sure people 2 bands lower then me are taking home more.
No, it’s much worse than a mortgage.
Barclays doesn’t get to say to me “you’ve got a pay rise, so I’m going to add 2% onto your interest rate”
Top up fees (or whatever they are called now) are the unfair part. Prior to 2006, students only needed maintenance loans. Fees had to be paid up front, but were means tested and were “only” about £1000 anyway. Maintenance loan was about £3000 at that time (this wasn’t actually enough to live on, but part time jobs were possibly easier to find)
So somebody who graduated around 2005 would have maybe £10,000 of student debt. Student loans are not the unfair part.
It’s the “pay your fees with loans, so that we can charge higher fees” part that is unfair and predatory. Encouraging 18 year olds to take on so much debt on the promise of higher earnings? In some cases, it would be better to have gone straight into a job from school, even if your starting wage was less, you wouldn’t have a mountain of debt over your head.
I don’t really understand why they’re defending an obviously broken system. It took me 20 years to pay mine off and I was on the original low interest loan and graduated with something like £9-10k debt.
Even if they haven’t got the fiscal room to do anything about it just be honest and admit it’s a bad system but it can’t be addressed into the fiscal situation has improved.