Speech by Liberal Democrat who planned to vote against coalition plans to triple university tuition fees
"I take no pleasure in voting against the plans put forward by [Vince Cable]. In many ways I welcome some of the proposals following the Browne review – increasing the threshold to £21,000 before graduates pay anything back is certainly a big improvement on the current £15,000 threshold.
"But I will be voting against an increase in tuition fees simply because I think an increase in the cap will discourage some young people from going to university in the future ... Under these proposals the least well-off quarter of graduates will be better off than under the current scheme introduced by the previous Labour government. But the flaw in my right honourable friend's proposal is that no one actually goes to university thinking they will be among those bottom 25% of graduates. Their assumption will always be that they will have to pay off the whole of their student debts, even though, for a large proportion of those, that will never be the case. So I believe a number of them will be put off from choosing to go in the first place.
"I benefited from a free education and I left university with a very small level of debt. So frankly I am not about to vote to leave future graduates with tens of thousands of pounds of debt. I actually stick by the old-fashioned principle that university education benefits the country and the economy as well as the individual. Graduates who are successful earn high wages, pay more taxes and repay the costs of their university education that way."
• John Leech is Liberal Democrat MP for Manchester Withington