Alex Chalk – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Alex Chalk on 2016-07-20.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate her Department has made of the cost to the public purse of uprating the earnings threshold for graduate repayments of student loans.

Joseph Johnson

In 2015 the government chose not to uprate from April 2017 the loan repayment threshold for ‘plan 2’ student loans — those issued for course starting from 2012 onwards. This decision will be reviewed again in 2021. The government consulted on this decision and published a detailed consultation response.

The forecasted cost of uprating the repayment threshold by earnings growth from April 2017 would be equal to the forecasted savings from freezing the threshold. These figures can be found in paragraphs 67 and 68 of the consultation response.

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