𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Rachel Reeves has imposed another new stealth tax on working people – but she hasn’t got away with it. She made what seems at first glance to be a small change to student loans. However, the truth is that this isn’t about students at all. It’s an increase in taxes paid by working people well into their 50s. And it’s a particularly unfair tax, too.

Her stealth increase was designed to hand the Government an extra £400 million every year. It was a particularly cynical move because Labour knows that many people don’t exactly feel a lot of sympathy for students. But student loan repayments are really a tax on graduates – which nowadays means around four in 10 people. You can still be paying for it 30 years after you left university (soon to be 40 years). And the tax rate is a massive 9% – in addition to income tax.

What Ms Reeves did was freeze the threshold at which people start to repay their student loans at £28,470 if they are on “plan two”, meaning they started university between 2012/13 and 2022/23. (If you went to university after 2023 you are on “plan 5” which is actually even worse).

Freezing a tax threshold is an old trick. It allows the Chancellor to say “freeze” instead of “increase”, but it actually means taxes go up, because of inflation. This is why it’s called a stealth increase.

But people have noticed. Labour MPs are unhappy. Student tuition fees have been around long enough that many senior journalists have had to pay them and now have loan repayments. They have noticed.

In case you’re wondering, I never had to pay tuition fees because I went to university before they existed. So I’m actually a winner in all this – younger people are paying a special tax that older people like me never had to pay.

But I can understand why younger people feel this is not fair.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is now promising to do something about it, cutting the graduate tax – just a bit – as part of a “new deal for young people”.

Labour points out that the Tories actually helped to create the current system, even though Rachel Reeves has made it worse. That’s true. The Conservatives have to take a share of the blame.

But all credit to them for admitting their mistake and promising to fix it now.

There’s a particular reason why Ms Reeves has made a huge error. Labour is currently losing votes to the left-wing Green Party, led by charismatic radical politician Zack Polanski.

Many of those attracted to the Green Party tend, as a general rule, to be younger, middle-class, and liberal-minded. The type of people who went to university, in other words.

So what has the Chancellor done? Increased a tax that targets precisely those people. It’s no wonder Labour is losing support.