The Liberal Democrats stand alone among the three main political parties in promising to abolish university tuition fees. They do so in the hope that making tuition ‘free’ will draw more students from low income families into the higher education (HE) system.

This superficially attractive proposition ignores two important facts, however.

First, there is no such thing as free tuition – someone, somewhere has to pay, and under the Liberal Democrat plan that ‘someone’ is the taxpayer. And since most taxpayers are non-graduates with relatively low lifetime earnings, the policy involves a significant redistribution of resources from poor to rich.

Second, the abolition of fees will do almost nothing to get more poor students into university as the Liberal Democrats claim. Why? Because the gap between the HE participation rates of rich and poor students was not created by the introduction of tuition fees. Indeed research suggests that the gap actually narrowed slightly in the years after fees were introduced in 1998.