Universities plan £3,000 fees

Universities today prepared to introduce tuition fees of up to £3,000 after ministers won a crucial vote in the Commons.

The scale of the revolt was smaller than in January when the Higher Education Bill scraped home by five votes.

But Mr Clarke and Tony Blair were relieved to have got the legislation through the Commons after months of bitter in-fighting that split Labour and damaged the Government. It now moves to the House of Lords, where Tory and Liberal Democrats could unite with rebel Labour peers to defeat it.

Last night a key rebel amendment, which would have kept fees to their current flat rate of £1,125 a year, was defeated by 288 votes to 316, the third tightest margin of victory for the Government-since 1997. Some 57 Labour rebels - including former ministers Clare Short and Frank Dobson - backed the amendment, tabled by leading rebel Ian Gibson.

Mr Clarke has declared that if it had been passed he would have ripped up the entire Bill and that universities would have lost a "once in a generation" chance to sort out their rocky finances.

Minutes before the vote, Higher Education Minister Alan Johnson told MPs the Government had accepted changes forcing ministers to gain the approval of both Houses before any rise in the £3,000 cap on fees. He said the Bill would now place a duty on future education secretaries to uphold the cap against any move by universities to break it.

Mr Clarke later said that, despite concessions-made during the course of the Bill's passage through the Commons, the "fundamental thrust" of the

reforms remained "precisely what we wanted to achieve at the outset".

Speaking on BBC2's Newsnight, he acknowledged that the £1billion raised from fees would not fill the gap in universities' finances. But he added: "For the universities, £ billion is a lot of money, which is why they so strongly support this Bill. It doesn't meet the gap, that's quite true, but it is a significant contribution."

Mr Clarke said there had been failings in the Government's presentation of the reforms. "I think we have conducted the parliamentary debate well," he said. "I don't think we have been very successful in explaining precisely our proposals more widely in the country. The more it is debated, the more people like our proposals and support them."

Shadow education secretary Tim Yeo said: "This is no victory for Blair. Yet again he has only been able to advance the progress of this Bill by strong-arming Scottish MPs whose vote does not affect students in Scotland."