Martin Tod backs NUS campaign against higher top-up fees

Winchester Prospective MP, Martin Tod, has signed up to support the National Union of Students (NUS) campaign Funding Our Future campaign. The campaign believes that the education funding system is too complicated to be helpful to students. Instead, the NUS are proposing a single, simple student finance support system that can be a central distribution mechanism for all finance questions and solutions.

The Government launched a review of higher education funding on 9 November 2009 which is expected to announce top-up fees of up to £10,000, an increase that both the Liberal Democrats and the NUS are vigorously against.

Commenting, Martin Tod said:

“Everyone who has the ability and desire to go to university should be able to, and the price of study should not be a hindrance.

“The Liberal Democrats have strongly opposed top-up fees and want to phase out tuition fees. We are strongly opposed to any increase. The Government should not be saddling students with even more debt. Instead we need one simple, centralised system of student finance that increases accessibility to further education, rather than acting as a further barrier to it.

“Higher education funding must be based on fairness and access to all, and I am therefore delighted to support the NUS campaign.”