Can I say to the Cabinet Secretary for Education that she, like Plaid Cymru, at least had the courage to go into an election with an alternative to the current system and to call out the emperor’s new clothes around the tuition subsidy? It costs too much, and it’s unsustainable, and I’ve been saying that for four years. The silence from the Labour benches, for not having the courage to go into an election to say what they believed in, is something that you can hear here today. [Interruption.] You certainly did—it was a useless policy, but you certainly had one, so that’s fair enough. [Laughter.] That’s fair enough.

So, the Cabinet Secretary knows, and she understands and appreciates, the depth of the challenges facing her. She will know as well that Professor Diamond has made a very valiant report that covers just about all aspects of the issues, apart from the one that Llyr Gruffydd in particular has highlighted: the need to attract more students to study and stay in Wales in order to strengthen our universities and in order to make that link with a developing economy in Wales. I think she does, and I welcome the fact that she’s reached out to look at how we can work together on that, but I think that she must acknowledge as well that that is a weakness in the current system. Nothing in Diamond immediately addresses that, although it is, of course, highlighted.

Can I just say that I was unable to attend Professor Diamond’s briefing this morning, so I’m very grateful to Mark Reckless for telling me that Professor Diamond did not, in fact, carry out one of the remits that he was given and that it changed because of instruction from the Welsh Government? I distinctly remember negotiating the remit with your predecessor, Huw Lewis, line by line, as an agreement between two parties of how we could address this funding issue. It now seems that the remit agreement was changed, without any reference to the original parties that made that agreement, and was changed in a way that could have influenced the way that Professor Diamond produced his report. So, I put on notice, unless you can reply immediately, that I will be examining how that came about.

Can I also ask the Cabinet Secretary whether she has any schadenfreude at all, as a Liberal Democrat in a Labour Cabinet, in introducing the element of means testing that was the only thing that the Labour Party actually ruled out in their manifesto—the means testing that I think, based on universality, is an inevitable consequence of going down the line of market testing within higher education? I’ve fought against that all my political life—voted against it in the House of Commons time after time when Labour was all lined up to vote it through. We have to deal with the situation we have and the limited resources we have. Therefore, the principle that she’s set out is one that I support and one that I welcome.

However, there are two elements of the principles that you said in your statement that I thought were missing. I don’t disagree with the ones that you set out as the way forward, but there were two that I thought were part of Diamond and are no longer there. One is to equalise the playing field between FE and HE—to have a more level system of choices so that people can genuinely choose an FE future, and that we do see that the resources that we spend as a nation are as supportive of FE as they are of HE. In that context, could you just—because I haven’t had time, I’m afraid, to read the detail of the report—reiterate the reasoning for linking student support to the living wage, and which living wage—John McDonnell’s living wage, Boris Johnson’s living wage? Which living wage? It seems wonderful, doesn’t it? It seems like a good socialist principle to link student support to living wage. But why are we linking Welsh student support to a living wage we have no control over, and a living wage that is not related to our economic circumstances? Why are we linking student support to a living wage when apprenticeships and apprentices do not get that kind of support? This, again, I’m concerned can skew us down to over-supporting HE at the cost of FE, and I think the future for Wales and the future for many of our communities is actually to increase the number of people going to FE and get those higher level apprenticeships. So, I’m really questioning what the basis for that is—not the principle, because I accept the principle, but what the basis of that is—and whether the true affordability is built into that. And I think students would get a very generous—. As Lynne Neagle said, it is very generous, but is it commensurate with our economic investment—that co-investment that she talked about?

And the second element that I would like to ask about—because that’s the level playing field—and the second principle that I thought was missing was one that said that we want to use this system now to close the HE funding gap in Wales. She stood on a manifesto commitment to restore part of the teaching grant. That’s no longer part of Diamond and it’s no longer part of her statement, but if we’re not going to restore the teaching grant, then how can you tell us how the released resources, which you mentioned in reply to questions, will flow back to investment in higher education? We know the funding gap is real—it’s about £90 million at the moment in HE. It’s grown over the years. We were unable to address it when we just funded students and we didn’t fund universities. In what way does Diamond now enable us to address that funding gap, and is it indeed a principle that she will hold dear to?