Students’ lifeline cut

Published: 20 January, 2011

• THIS has been a bad week for Islington. Parliament has agreed the second reading of the Localism Bill, the government has published its Health Bill and on Wednesday it sadly rejected a Labour motion to save the education maintenance allowance (EMA). 

Islington faces a terrible housing shortage, with around 13,000 applicants on the waiting list and more than 30 per cent of the population now living in private rented accommodation.  

Funds for building new council housing are drying up, and under this legislation the  council can discharge its obligation to homeless people by putting them in private rented accommodation, with no permanency of tenure. At the very least we need much better standards and rent control in the private sector but, above all, we need a national endeavour to provide more council-owned and run accommodation – the only way of sustaining our communities and ensuring children are brought up in a secure and safe environment. 

Nye Bevan, the iconic founder of the NHS, said that it would only last as long as there were “people with the will to fight for it”.  The government’s plan to give GP consortia (who are independent contractors anyway) 80 per cent of the NHS budget will inevitably mean that in many places the private health industry not only takes over administration of the budget, but also decides where the contract should be placed. This may well end up with public funds going into private hospitals at the expense of valued NHS assets like the Whittington, Royal Free or UCH.

The abolition of primary care trusts reduces local accountability, and thus the role of local government, with the lack of accountability being a serious problem in the new legislation. 

EMA is a maximum of £30 a week for 16 to 18-year-olds who come from below-average-income households. It has proved to be a lifeline for many of our young people going through college and on to university. Its removal damages the life chances of tens of thousands of students and inevitably will make universities less open and more elitist.

The government’s 85 per cent cut in EMA is a tragedy and a terrible message of its lack of commitment to widening educational opportunities.

JEREMY CORBYN 
Islington North Labour MP