SCRAP TUITION FEES!

Way back in the Dark Ages I was a university student. In those days, young people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds got full maintenance grants. Which meant more than enough to pay for accommodation and food and also to buy books, clothes, beers and all the other nuts and bolts of student life. As I recollect, my final year grant was something like £400 a term.
Almost 30 years on, the Govt is trumpeting the news that maintenance grants are to be made available to more students. Fine. But it's the "princely sum" of £2800 a year which is about £900 a term. I have a niece at uni ( who doesn't qualify for the grant as her parents are just over the threshold) and her accommodation alone is something like £700.00 a term. So how can that be enough?
I don't mean to be churlish. An extra £400million is being made available and the bar raised from £18,000 to £25,000 to qualify for grants Welcome news, yes. But Minister John Denham concedes this will affect only FOUR per cent of the nation's students. Tuition fees won't be affected either though students starting in 2008 will be "entitled" to a holiday from their repayments of up to five years once they graduate. It's just not enough.
Let's have equity on this and scrap tuition fees completely. As they already have been scrapped for students in Scotland. And then let's have a look at the huge albatross of student loans and how we stop more generations being saddled with debt.