The National Union of Students president Aaron Porter has today hit out at claims made by the Times yesterday over its alleged “leaked memo”.

In a statement to Liberal Conspiracy, he said the memo had been available on the NUS’ website for over a week and was not hidden at all.

He also rejected the claim that he called the rise in tuition fees “progressive”, as the Times article implied.

No amount of window-dressing can detract from the fact that high fees that will put off poorer students, he said.

As I said in open letters to Nick Clegg in November and December of last year there is no sense in a progressive payment system if the overall outcomes are regressive and include the socially regressive step of removing the vast majority of funding for teaching at universities.

The structure of the repayment system is such that those that earn the very least after they graduate will pay less than those who go on to earn the most. But regardless of this element, all but the richest students who can pay their fees upfront, will end up owing more when they graduate than they do now.

A confusing and underfunded system of bursaries fee waivers and scholarships and a system that allows those from richer backgrounds to avoid taking on the debt in the first place mean that the changes voted through by MPs in December are a leap backwards for university funding.

The NUS has decided to take a more pragmatic approach in opposing the rise in tuition fees.

The union says it is accepted by everyone that there will be an 80% cut to direct government teaching grants, enabled by a huge 40% cut to government funding of universities overall.

The system is baffling, chaotic and short sighted – so our advice to students’ unions is to secure the maximum clarity and value from the fees their university will set.

He said this advice was being interpreted by the media as accepting what the government was doing – which was not the case.

Both universities and their students have been put between a rock and a hard place, having to decide between investing in the student experience and keeping prices down. If the government had not gone down the untested and hugely risky path of just leaving it for the market to resolve, we could now look at the issue properly and constructively. Either way it is now future students who face the toughest choices.

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