Political Feature: New Labour’s Kate Green

I was educated in Scotland and went to university in the end in Edinburgh, where I graduated in law, which is absolutely no use down here at all because it’s Scots law and it’s completely different, and then I came down to London to work for Barclays.

What about prior to university?

I lived in Midloathian which is in Scotland, southern Scotland, went to school in, well you won’t heard of it, a place called Currie.

From a political point of view, where do you come from?

I’ve been involved on and off over the years in politics, and certainly in this constituency, in the Cities of London and Westminster, for about the last five or six years since I came back to live in London.

You haven’t stood as a councillor?

No, no I haven’t. By way of background, I live in the City of London personally, the City, we have put Labour candidates up from time to time but the City Corporation is a very odd political animal which effectively doesn’t organise on party lines.

So you do actually live in the constituency?

I live in the constituency yeah, and I work in it as well. I work in Westminster for Barclays Bank. I’ve been in Westminster for about nine months, I was at Piccadilly Circus for two or three years before that, and for years before that in the Head Office, which is in the City.

Where do you stand on the funding of third level education, how do you see the future?

First of all I’m very opposed to top up fees, and I will carry on taking that position. I don’t think the current student loans system is working at all, it’s loading up huge debts for students which they then have to pay off over a very short period really. And I think that’s deterring particularly less well off families from going into education, and I think it’s also very important that institutions aren’t put in a position where they’re competing against one another either for research monies or to attract the best students.

Do you see the future as a revamped student loans system, or as a graduate tax?

I’m not sure what you would call it, I think that it’s unrealistic now to expect that a system of grants is going to be sufficient, but it’s very important that we structure a repayment programme to the time when they are best able to make the repayments.

Surely there are quite significant differences from a National Insurance led system where you pay for your lifetime, and having fixed amount to pay back?

I think you’ve got to look at something which is in between the two otherwise for example you’re penalising people who take more expensive courses or who take a longer course, so that architects for example would be paying back a lot more than people on three year courses in perhaps the Arts or something. But I don’t think that it’s fair either to say to students that you’ve got this indefinite burden for life, if you’re genuinely talking about recouping the cost of supporting them during their education you can’t say you’ve got to pay that back for ever and ever until your income dries up.

In the Labour Party’s submission to Dearing they seemed to outline a plan for a learning bank, how long would it take to put it into place?

I think it’s something they would want to try to do reasonably quickly. I don’t think that there’s any intention, that there won’t be undergraduates going through university programmes, post-graduate programmes and so on.

So it could be quite some years before undergraduate degrees at Imperial are for instance part of that?

I guess what will happen is that bits of them will get into it before other bits, so you might say there are parts, especially degrees at Imperial I would imagine, bits that are very vocational or very technical that could be really closely allied to people’s perhaps technical on the job training, obviously at a fairly high level.

So you might start going through the colleges and universities and start taking parts?

And getting some sort of credit for them, now that’s going to require a quite radical big thinking for institutions that have traditionally really only had to think within their own operation.

Wasn’t the Dearing Commission an attempt to take third level education funding off the political agenda, and didn’t the Labour Party collude in this?

I’m not sure whether that was the reason it was set up, I don’t think you can take tertiary education funding out of the political agenda, it matters far too much to too many people and there’s too much money in it.

So you wouldn’t say that it is an attempt, a fairly crude attempt, to put it off the agenda?

I hope it isn’t, I’d be very, very dismayed if it were, and I’d be ashamed, and I would think that it would be a real betrayal of the next generations, for those of us who’ve been lucky enough to get that education to sit back and say oh we’re not really going to bother about how it’s funded for the future.

Will Labour reinstate the Science and Technology Minister to Cabinet?

Gosh I don’t know, I really haven’t a clue, but I mean I think, we’ve got to have a huge commitment to making the importance of science and technology much more visible.

So you didn’t think it was a problem taking the OST within the DTI [Department of Trade and Industry]?

I’m not sure that I’ve got a really strong view one way or another. I do think it’s very, very important to get the profile raised. We need to look at all the ways we can of raising that, and that might well mean considering whether we’ve got the organisation within the government itself right.

Do the Tories have any safe seats? I’ll say to you quite openly, Labour is targeting first of all those seats which we must take to get a decent majority in Parliament, and in the order of those seats which we must take, Cities of London and Westminster is fairly low down.

Was this the only constituency where you applied to be a candidate?

No I applied to a few others, two or three not very many. I was really quite focused because it’s a very time consuming process and I wanted to learn how to do it