The Greens' plan to abolish tuition fees
The Green Party would scrap university tuition fees and restore living-cost grants — and holds a longer-term ambition to write off existing graduate debt. For current graduates, that ambition is the difference between a policy for future students and one that changes their own payslip.
What's proposed
Three parts, with different levels of firmness: abolish tuition fees for future students (firm, long-standing policy); restore maintenance grants so living costs don't become loans (firm); and cancel or write down existing graduate debt (an ambition the party has costed only loosely — the outstanding loan book exceeds £250 billion, so any government would likely phase it).
What it would mean for money
- Future students: no £9,535+/year fee loans; a typical three-year degree stops generating ~£30,000 of fee debt before living costs.
- Current graduates: only the debt-cancellation ambition touches them. Full cancellation would end the 9% deduction above the threshold — worth about £320/year to a Plan 2 graduate on £32,000, and thousands to high earners years from write-off. Check your own repayment path in the student loan calculator.
- The taxpayer: fees abolition costs roughly £10bn+ a year; most Plan 2 debt is already forecast never to be repaid, so cancellation's true cost is lower than its sticker price — but still tens of billions.
Where the other parties stand
Labour raised fees with inflation and reintroduced targeted maintenance grants, arguing the priority is university solvency; the Conservatives defend the loan model as progressive in practice; Reform has proposed restricting loans for what it calls low-value courses. The deeper argument is the one our calculator makes visible: for most graduates the "loan" already functions as a 9% graduate tax — the parties differ on whether to abolish it, rebrand it, or narrow who incurs it.
Sources & further reading
- Green Party — education policy and manifesto.
- Institute for Fiscal Studies — student finance modelling and cancellation costings.
- House of Commons Library — student loan statistics.
Figures are from public material and may change. Not financial, legal or tax advice.