UNIVERSITY tuition fees are to be hiked by the government in the latest indication of undead austerity.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson told MPs last night that the fees will rise to £9,535 per year from April, broadly in line with current inflation, hitting tens of thousands of students.

This is the first rise since 2017 and represents a double deception  by PM Sir Keir Starmer. 

Abolition of the fees altogether was one of the 10 policy commitments of his 2020 Labour leadership campaign, and this year’s Labour manifesto made no mention of an increase.

University and Colleges Union general secretary Jo Grady called the decision “both economically and morally wrong. Taking more money from debt-ridden students and handing it to overpaid underperforming vice-chancellors is ill conceived and won’t come close to addressing the sector’s core issues.

“As Keir Starmer himself said last year, the current fees system doesn’t work for students and doesn’t work for universities.

“The model is broken; it has saddled students with decades of debt, turned universities from sites of learning into corporations obsessed with generating revenue, and continually degraded staff pay and working conditions.

“Labour accepts the issues facing higher education are systemic yet has only applied a sticking plaster. Its principles are vague and could be exploited by vice-chancellors, while higher fees mean even more graduates will fail to pay back their loans, ultimately costing the exchequer.

“The Chancellor says ‘invest, invest, invest’: it is time to do that in higher education, especially if Labour is serious about delivering a decade of national renewal.”

Left MP Zarah Sultana, sitting as an independent, also slammed the move, saying: “The government’s increase to tuition fees is wrong.

“Students shouldn’t have to pay tuition this year, or any year. It’s time to abolish tuition fees and cancel student debt because education is a public good, not a commodity.”

Ms Phillipson took the government’s standard “needs must” line, blaming the increase on the crisis in university finances under the last government, adding: “This is not a decision I wanted to take.”

Tuition fees were a New Labour invention, introduced in 1998 and standing at £3,000 a year when Gordon Brown left office.

The Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition notoriously trebled the fees to £9,000, a decision which has haunted the Liberal Democrats ever since.