Labour pledges to reinstate maintenance grants

A Labour government would reinstate maintenance grants for disadvantaged students, the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, and Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, have announced.

The decision to cut maintenance grants and replace them with loans was announced as part of then Chancellor, George Osborne’s, 2015 budget, and was implemented earlier this month.

Labour explained that to pay for the reintroduction of the maintenance grants, they would increase corporation tax by up to 1.5%.

Rayner and Corbyn said “it is disgraceful that the Conservative government abolished student grants that levelled the playing field for young people from low and middle income backgrounds.”

They argued Britain as a whole benefits from those who attend university, not just students themselves. They said that although neither of them went to university, they have “nevertheless benefited from those that did.”

The examples that they gave included visiting the GP or dentist, and the provision of education for their children in schools.

Labour also hinted at a potential reintroduction of Education Maintenance Allowances (EMA), which had been scrapped in 2010 by the coalition government.

The EMA were means-tested payments of between £10 and £30 every week, that were supposed to help encourage sixth form students to stay in school and further education.

They were axed in 2010 by the coalition government, which described them as a badly-targeted use of education funding.

A Conservative spokesperson said that the “reformed financial support has helped tackle the real barriers to participation, with record numbers in education and training post-16.”