London Underground says there are 61 step free, accessible stations in London but, as last night’s BBC News investigation showed, the lifts are too small for more than one person – especially since most wheelchair users would always need a carer with them on public transport.

As Steve Smith, the son of a long-term wheelchair user, told the BBC:

“The underground stations with ‘accessible lifts’ as you could see in the report are too small and not easily accessible for a disabled person and their luggage and any carers. God knows how they would feel if they suffered from claustrophobia!

“If they put proper lifts of a decent size in, they would be accessible to everyone who needs help accessing the underground – not just some of the disabled.”

A spokesperson for Transport for London told Left Foot Forward:

“We would like all stations to be step-free, but it costs a lot of money – a lot more than people think. There are 8,500 step-free buses, all black taxi drivers have ramps and drivers are trained to assist disabled people. All of the Docklands Light Railway stations have lifts.

“Disability is not only about people in wheelchairs – we now have announcements and hearing loops for those who are deaf and blind.”

Unfortunately for the Coalition Government, they are currently making massive spending cuts wherever possible – just when spending extra money on sport and access would have allowed the rest of the world to see London for the wonderful place it is.

Unfortunately for Paralympic athletes and their disabled fans, disabled people already feel that their services are at the top of the list of things to make cuts to. So while it is to be hoped that Tube stations will become more accessible in the next two years, disabled Tube users cannot be blamed for having their doubts.

It is to be hoped, however, that the Government will consider the fact that if and when Paralympic athletes and disabled fans are able to get around the city, they will spend just as much money as anyone else during London 2012 and will, in this way, contribute to our economy, just as Olympic athletes and their non disabled fans will.

More than 650,000 people have applied for a place on university course this year, more than ever before, and this is being used by apologists for top-up fees, such as the Russell Group of ‘elite’ universities, as a demonstration that they do not deter young people from going university.

Clearly these people haven’t spoken to any students recently. If they did they would hear story after story of young people at the beginning of their working lives saddled with £20,000 or more of debt and terrified about what the future brings.

The same people say that this means that a further doubling, or even tripling, of fees would bring in the money that universities desperately need and not affect the numbers of young people who apply for a university course.

Once again they are ignoring clear evidence that the doubling of fees demanded by vice chancellors would put a significant proportion of students off going to university and that the prospect of debt affects those from lower-income families significantly more than others.

Even if fees were no deterrent to those from poorer backgrounds going to university, further widening the gap between rich and poor, they would still be deeply regressive.

A sticker price placed on a degree that asks a teacher to pay the same for their degree as a corporate lawyer, both professions that require a university education, unfairly punishes those who gain least financially from their degrees. The system is broken and must be replaced with one that asks graduates to contribute based on their real earnings.

That graduate contribution should be paired with recognition from the government that a well educated work-force is beneficial to society in general, and that this requires better investment. Public investment in higher education in the UK is below the OECD average, 20% less than France, and 10% less than the US.

Other countries recognise that higher level skills are essential for both economic recovery and the future employment needs of the country and continue to increase the number of places at university. The UK has slipped from third to eleventh placed in the OECD in its graduation rates, slipping behind countries like Japan, Sweden, and even Slovakia.

Of the 650,000 people applying for university this year, up to 200,000 will miss out on a place because the government has placed an arbitrary cap on the number of people that can go to university. This is not based on the number of qualified candidates – 3,500 straight A students weren’t offered a university place last year – but rather a lack of willingness from successive governments to fund places for every student with the ability and ambition to go into higher education.

Instead, the current government have compounded cuts made by their predecessor meaning that those students who do get a place at university will be entering institutions struggling to provide adequately for them.

For Ministers to decry poverty of opportunity while presiding over this current crisis is cheap talk, but to stand by and do nothing as young people are left to sink or swim is a dereliction of duty. Abandoning this generation of young people would cause permanent scars to individuals and their families, society and the economy.

More widely, there are clearly serious issues with a funding system that is unable to support the hundreds of thousands of applicants who have made the grade, and leaves a quarter of applicants without a place. The discredited system of top-up fees exploits applicants’ limited options by heaping £25,000 debt on top of the significant pressures they already face. Ministers must introduce a fair, progressive and sustainable alternative that supports rather than penalises students.

An educated workforce is the driver of a modern economy and a Government desperate to get the UK back on sound financial footing should recognise the transformative power of universities and students, and fund their future accordingly.

Next Left today dig out David Cameron’s eve of election mimic of President George H. W. Bush. On May 4th, referring to pensioner provisions such as the Winter Fuel Allowance, David Cameron told an election rally:

“And let me say very clearly to pensioners if you have a Conservative Government your Winter Fuel Allowance, your bus pass, your Pension Credit, your free TV licence all these things are safe. You can read my lips, that is a promise from my heart. Don’t believe the lies you’re being told by the Labour Party just because they’ve got nothing positive to say.”

As the BBC’s Nick Robinson blogged at the time:

“It’s an unfortunate phrase given its history. George Bush Sr was the first to say “read my lips”. The rest of the sentence was “no new taxes”. It helped him win the presidency in 1988. He went on to raise taxes to reduce the deficit and “read my lips” became shorthand for broken political promises.”

Watch President Bush’s famous remarks:

Labour leadership contender David Miliband has launched a campaign calling for David Cameron to “come clean on Winter Fuel Payments”. You can join the campaign here.

With media coverage of the NHS focusing on the negative, 38 Degrees members decided it was time to correct the balance with a view positive stories of their own. You can read the stories here – http://www.38degrees.org.uk/share-your-NHS-stories/

38 Degrees member Joanne explains:

“I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis at age 29, my local NHS have been simply wonderful supporting me through it all. We can’t let a fantastic service like this be eroded by back door privatisation.”

Others value the security that the NHS gives over a lifetime, like 38 Degrees member Gordon:

“I am 55, and I know that whatever happens to me in my last few decades, I will always be well cared for, and with no worries whatsoever about what it will all cost. And this applies to every single person in our country, not just those of us who can afford it.“

All over the map, which has comments drawn from almost every part of the UK, 38 Degrees activists are also clear about their political worries for the NHS. Paul, from London, says:

“I am very concerned for the future of the services provided as part NHS. The prospect of this current coalition government forcing through drastic ideologically driven cuts under the mask of ‘essential spending reduction’ is a real worry.”

The Coalition is planning to move fast – legislation is expected before the end of the year. But those opposing the plans are moving quickly too. With thousands of people across the country opposing the reform of the NHS, forcing through these changes to the NHS may prove to be a step too far for the new Coalition.

• Stand up for the NHS by adding your voice here:-

http://www.38degrees.org.uk/share-your-NHS-stories/

The major findings for UK readers are that whilst mortality has declined in most countries, the UK starting from a high base has achieved one of the biggest improvements—with about a third less deaths.

This study starkly contrasts with the equally well-reported EUROCARE study that found relatively poor improvements in ‘cancer survival’ in the UK. Why the difference? Well, ‘mortality’ and ‘cancer survival’ are different indicators each with their own problems.

Mortality as the name suggests measures the rate of death from a disease within the whole population; e.g. 28.2 breast cancer deaths per 100,000 in the UK according to the BMJ study. Mortality figures were highlighted in the election when David Cameron questioned the value of the extra cancer investment.

He said:

“Now what Gordon Brown is not telling you about the situation with cancer, cancer drugs and cancer outcomes is after all of the things that he has talked about, all of the money that has gone in, our death rate from cancer is actually worse than Bulgaria’s so all that has happened has not actually improved the outcome which is what matters.”

Well – so what? Whilst I’m reluctant usually to rely on anecdotal evidence, I‘ve been in a Bulgarian hospital and I’m pretty confident that their low cancer mortality has nothing to do with standards of care.

At a guess I would say it might be their record keeping or the fact they die on average much earlier of other causes. Mortality is probably a useful metric for following cancer trends but it has problems comparing between countries.

Meanwhile survival is the percentage of people that are alive sometime after diagnosis – e.g. 49.6 per cent overall cancer survival after five years in the UK according to EUROCARE. However it is as malleable to changes in diagnosis as it is to changes in the success of treatment.

The authors of the BMJ report point out that the countries that have reported the greatest success in improving EUROCARE4 survival rates are also those that have reported the greatest increases in incidence.

In short they suggest these countries have instigated intensive screening programs and have identified many small relatively benign cancer – many of which may never have progressed or proved life threatening at all. So perversely intensive screening can greatly improve survival without improving mortality very much.

Furthermore, in an accompanying editorial (behind paywall), to the BMJ study it is claimed that UK survival statistics are also lowered due to an administrative gap between diagnosis of cancer and the often-later registration of diagnosis. D’oh!

On the whole I trust the BMJ study. The improvement reported is consistent with the experience of most cancer professionals. There is a larger message here however over just how slippery statistics can be, and particularly international comparisons. Evidence based policy is seldom simple.

The main academic and student bodies are also divided over the issue, with the University and College Union warning Vince Cable’s proposed changes risk escalating the cost of a degree for all students, while the National Union of Students, who support a graduate tax, cautioned against making “sensationalist and simplistic judgements”.

The most left-field suggestion comes from Marcus Booth and Dylan Thomas, who are both on the Conservatives’ approved list of candidates, who explain on Conservative Home:

“The UK spends a little over 1% of GDP on higher education, over 70% of which is government spending in the form of research grants, tuition fee subsidies, and student bursaries.

“Income from tuition fees, currently set at £3,300 per student, comes to only 0.15% of GDP or approximately £5 billion. This is small change for the government but an increasingly heavy burden for graduates.

“We believe that every pound spent by the state on education will have a far greater multiplier effect than the same pound spent on welfare payments to NEETs (not in employment, education or training). Therefore, tuition fees are not a necessary evil but in fact a result of a failure to prioritise government spending.”

While Carswell wrote:

“Taxing graduates more for being graduates is a great idea. If you want to induce economic stupor… Universities need more funding. And more young people want to study. Great. If Society is going to be Big, then let them work it out without imposing blanket solutions or expropriating anyone’s future earnings.”

The UCU, however, says key workers, including doctors, teachers and nurses, would face “massively increased study bills” and the cost of a university degree “would rocket”:

“Teachers, nurses, doctors and social workers would pay considerably more back than under the current system. Under a model where graduates pay a tax of 5% over 25 years, doctors would pay back over £100,000 (£105,564) and teachers close to £50,000 (£46,046).”

General secretary Sally Hunt added:

“Whatever scheme is proposed to replace fees, the government must ensure that studying for key professions remains attractive and that the prospect of prohibitive costs over a lifetime will not put off the next generation of innovators and public servants.

“We urge Vince Cable to look again at the idea of taxing big business for the substantial benefit it gains from a plentiful supply of graduates, rather than merely looking to penalise students further.”

In his emergency Budget, George Osborne made two important choices: to bring down the deficit earlier and faster than Labour would have, and to use a higher proportion of cuts and a lower proportion of tax increases. In addition, he introduced some important spending increases (such as £3.7 billion to partly reverse the increase in employer NI Contributions and £3.9 billion to raise income tax personal allowances) that have to be paid for by bigger cuts than would otherwise be necessary.

Alistair Darling planned to cut spending by 2014-15 by £52 billion and to increase taxes by £21 billion; George Osborne’s budget added £32 billion to the cuts and £8 billion to the tax increases (net of cuts in NI, income, and corporation tax). As Tim Horton and Howard Reed have pointed out, the cuts have a disproportionate impact on low income families, even when offset by any gains from the increase in personal allowances.

The scale of the cuts made it obvious that anyone who wanted to make the case against them would have to keep up with a growing list of cuts announcements and that we would need a resource that kept a record of them. Try looking for the 1980s cuts on the Internet – there’s bits and pieces, but there isn’t a comprehensive list. That’s why the Trades Union Congress established Cuts Watch on our Touchstone blog – noting down the news of cuts as we learn about them.

There are three groups of cuts. First, there are the “savings” announced by the Treasury on 24 May, which cut this year’s spending by £6.2 billion. During the election the Conservatives promised that there would be “efficiency savings” this year rather than cuts. The measures on the list include real cuts, such as the abolition of the Future Jobs Fund, the Low Carbon Buildings Programme and the Child Trust Fund and the decision to abandon the loan for Forgemasters. On the same day, the new government began a review of spending commitments made by their predecessors, leading eventually to the cancellation of Building Schools for the Future. Since then there has been a steady trickle of these cuts, emerging from all Departments – most recently the cancellation of Domestic Violence Protection Orders that would have protected the families of violent men while they are going through the legal process necessary to get a longer-term Protection Order. Even people who see themselves as progressive supporters of the Coalition will have at least one item on that list that they believe should never have been touched.

The May “savings” also included £1.2 billion in funding for local authorities and ring fences being removed from another £1.7 billion. This has led to so many cuts around the country that we’ve only been able to report a fraction. One clear theme that is emerging is that the removal of ring-fencing is leaving youth services exposed and in the last week we have reported on cuts to Connexions and youth projects in Birmingham, Hampshire, Norfolk, Sheffield, Coventry, Northumberland and Slough. It seems likely that, by the end of the year, we will no longer have a careers service that covers the whole country

The second group of savings is made up of those cuts that were announced in the Budget. There was the two-year freeze in public sector pay and £11 billion in cuts to benefits and tax credits. Payments to families with babies were hit by cuts in Maternity Grants and Baby Tax Credits and the abolition of the Health in Pregnancy Grant and all children will lose out because of the 3-year freeze of Child Benefit. Cuts in tax credits worth £3.2 billion are dwarfed by what looks like a technical change: uprating benefits and public sector pensions in line with the Consumer Price Index instead of the Retail Price Index is expected to save the government £5.8 bn a year. The Budget announced that everyone who gets Disability Living Allowance is going to be re-assessed, with the expectation that the entitlement of one claimant in every five will be removed. Housing Benefit reforms will put a cap on the amount that can be claimed – regardless of what your rent may actually be – and will subject unemployed people to an arbitrary 10 per cent reduction in their HB once they have been unemployed for over a year.

Finally, there are the rumours of the cuts that are going to be announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review on 20 October. The Coalition’s supporters are working themselves into a lather about the possibility that Trident or the RAF’s Tornados may be scrapped or the army may lose three of its eight brigades – hence Simon Heffer’s proposal that the aid budget should be scrapped instead. Heffer is in a perpetual harrumph about the Cameron government, but the pre-emptive leaking of October cuts is bound to focus attention on the decision to exempt overseas aid from the cuts – the Tory right could mobilise around this issue. Other possibilities that may just be kite-flying but could be genuine leaks include means-testing Child Benefit and scrapping bus passes.

The totality of these cuts – which go far beyond anything envisaged by Alistair Darling – is to achieve a new British settlement with a smaller state and higher levels of inequality. The success of the Coalition will depend on whether they get away with claiming these were an inevitable consequence of the deficit or whether their is a backlash against the inevitable unfairness of this ideological approach.

Whilst calling for a cross party discussion on how Scotland should address the tough spending choices ahead, Swinney rejected the call for the NHS to face cuts just as any other services will, commenting:

“…we will apply any Barnett consequentials arising out of the protection given to the health service by the UK Government to the health service in Scotland.”

Responding, the British Medical Association warned that whilst cuts to the NHS Scotland budget would be a “seismic shock”, the SNP had to properly plan and prepare for the cuts that are to come.

The BMA has admitted:

“If the scale of real-terms reduction in public spending in Scotland is anything like that envisaged by the review, it would be naïve to believe that the healthcare budget, one-third of the Scottish Government expenditure, could remain immune from its impact.”

Adding:

“It is vital that decisive action is taken now to start prioritising the core functions of the NHS to ensure they are protected as far as possible from the effects of the budget cuts and that quality of care and patient safety are maintained.”

The BMA’s stark calls for a more realistic debate over the future financing of the NHS in Scotland are echoed by concerns expressed by the body representing Scottish local government, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA), that ring-fencing the NHS would mean local government would be faced with having to make the brunt of the cuts to come, hitting some of the most vulnerable the hardest.

The debate across Scotland mirrors that being continued in Westminster, following shadow health secretary and Labour leadership candidate Andy Burnham’s call for the coalition government to drop its plans to ring-fence England’s NHS budget in order to provide greater protection to areas such as social care, under the control of local authorities.

Michael Gove and Sarah Teather’s join press release yesterday outlines that:

“The proposed pupil premium would provide additional per pupil funding on top of the existing funding provided to schools. Schools will be free to spend the additional funding as they choose to raise the achievement of disadvantage pupils.”

On her blog earlier this month, Lynne Featherstone – the Coalition’s equalities minister – said:

“Obviously – the new coalition government’s ‘pupil premium’ in the coalition agreement – where £2.5 billion will come on stream starting in the second year of government – and where the money follows the pupil with special needs or on free school meals (and which will benefit every single school in Haringey) will be a blessing. However, that will bring us in a lot of money – but equally it will bring money into those boroughs like Camden and Hackney too.”

But the Department for Education’s budget for 2010-11 set out that £46.5 billion of the department’s total spending of £68.7 billion would be on “schools including Sixth Form”. The remaining budget of £22.2 billion is made up of £10.3 billion on the Teachers’ Pensions Scheme and £11.9 billion on support for children, families and young people. Finding £2.5 billion for a new pupil premium from this latter budget would mean a reduction of 24.2 per cent in funding for programmes like Sure Start and Education Maintenance Allowances unless pensions were slashed. This would be above and beyond the cuts of up to 20 per cent being planned by the department. The DoE has already cut £670m from its budget this year. An alternative would be for further cuts in other departments.

Confounding the uncertainty around the cost, the efficacy of the scheme is uncertain. According to the IFS, “the level of funding targeted at deprivation has increased rapidly in recent years, particularly in terms of the funding provided by local authorities.” They go on to conclude that:

“any revenue-neutral or low-net-cost [pupil premium] option is likely to lead to significant numbers of schools experiencing large losses in per-pupil funding. Minimising such losses with additional public spending is likely to prove difficult given the level of fiscal restraint required over the course of the next parliament.”

This prompted the Financial Times to report ”doubts cast on ‘pupil premium’ proposals.” Even with the Conservative’s guarantee during the election that the pupil premium will “not be taken from other schools”, the IFS were only prepared to say that, “there is little more we can say about the Conservatives plans for a pupil premium.”

Dr Cable said he was “interested in looking at the feasibility of changing the system of financing student tuition so that the repayment mechanism is variable graduate contributions tied to earnings”. This is the basis of a progressive graduate contribution that asks those graduates who gain the most financially from their education to contribute the most to the continuing of the system.

With this as our base line there are still many variables to decide upon – the threshold at which contribution begins, the level at which the contribution is set, etc – and I look forward to working with Dr Cable and Lord Browne to find the fairest way to set these.

However, over the last week it has become clear that many see Dr Cable’s exploration of a graduate tax as simply a rebranding exercise to mollify Liberal Democrat backbenchers, who fought the election on a promise of scrapping tuition fees, and students, who have campaigned for many years for a fairer higher education funding system.

The Russell Group of universities proposes keeping, and liberalising, the ‘sticker price’ market in higher education and whether you call the payback scheme a loan or a tax it will still be a ‘poll tax’ and not based on ability to pay. That graduate tax is not a graduate tax at all, but fees by another name.

Those sceptical of the idea of a graduate contribution, see only the rebranding exercise and argue that free higher education is the only progressive way to ensure that university education is available to all, and in an ideal world higher education would be paid for through existing taxation, but a graduate tax is a fair and progressive system. It adds a small amount of extra taxation onto those who gain financially from attending university.

The current system, and an expanded market in fees, ask a social worker, teacher or nurse to pay the same for their education as an investment banker, corporate lawyer or high-flying executive. No one could rightfully claim that the former group work less hard than those in the latter group, but they do earn less.

Over the coming months as Lord Browne continues his review, the debate will rage about the best way to fund universities and we must be clear about what we mean when we are discussing the various systems. A true graduate tax is a clear and progressive way of funding universities and removes any link to ‘sticker prices’ decided by institutions based on their self-aggrandising assessments of the future worth of their degrees.

Choosing a place and course of study is not like buying a car and we will ensure that any system that places students in a market place cannot call itself a progressive graduate tax.