How do you fix inequality?

28:20They should increase the percentage. They should say that people need to pay more in. But they do change the rules. Whereas ISAs, it's like 20K, no tax. Definite. You know, as soon as that's messed with, I think people start to go, I can't trust anything here. Do you understand what I mean? Yeah, I do understand. I mean, it's very interesting. Pensions feel like they can move away from you at all points. And people think like, well, by the time I'm 30 now, I'm not, but let's pretend I am for a second. You wish. By the time I can access my private pension, the age might be 62, 60, whatever. And I want to know that I can bridge that gap.

28:55And I do that with an ISO. And I'm going to need more than 100 grand to do that. But if you look at the changes, and I take your point. It's a very interesting point. But if you actually look at the changes that you are complaining about, I mean, I personally don't think that the pension pot should ever have been something that was a heritable asset. It's something to fund your pension. And the exemption from inheritance tax was quite recent. And then it's since been reversed. And on the pension age, the age at which you can take out your pension is unusually low in Britain. And I do think that it's probably one of the reasons why we've got a lot of people in their 50s and early 60s who haven't stayed in the labour market.

29:38The ones who built up a big enough pot could take it out with enjoying all the tax reliefs. So they're not – I think those have both been valid changes. And I don't think they're just changing the rules all the time. I'm not complaining. What I'm saying is the rules change. Yeah, that is a fair point. And what I mean by that is I'm being asked to save for a 30-year, 40-year period, and I don't know the rules of the game. I'm playing football, and they're changing the rules while I'm playing. ISIS, I know the rules. Do you know what I mean? Right. So that's why I think there's uncertainty around pensions, and I think that's why people don't trust them.

30:14And then you add in scandals from the past, which are a hangover, and I know that they're not relevant, but to a certain demographic, they just think someone's going to raid my pension. They don't understand, you know, this. So you're, this is really, we're at ThinkTax, we're always, Resolution, we're always listening in. And you were saying on the basis of the kind of engagement you get from people with your podcast, that the ISA is just such a recognised, emblematic form of saving. Yeah, and it's trusted because the rules are easy. You can pay up to 20K and then it will never be taxed. And I get people all the time say, ISAs are better than pensions.

30:46And I'm like, no, they're not. Because the pension system provides the rebate or the you know the tax relief and you can compound that relief and then you can decide when you take the money out you know in 90 of cases because most people fall from a higher rate taxpayer to a base they drop a tax band when they retire yeah the pension will be better but people are like i don't give a shit my ice is what i'm doing because i trust my ice you know so i think as soon as we mess with the ice we we discourage people to save and i think that would be a real shame well i think the other way into this as i said is if we can make the auto enrolled pension pot more isa like put a bit more money in give it a bit extra flexibility i hope people may also see that that helps meet some of the challenges yeah i do have to say though with this auto enrollment what about people like me all the self-employed people because we don't get auto enrollment and the isa is kind of something that we use what i personally use to like save towards my retirement my pet i got my sip but also my isa i got lisa sip isa so my son's got a junior isa so what what about like in the foundation are you guys thinking about self-employed people as well with these changes yeah and and i think that it would be great to get them properly into this into the auto enroll pension model as well yeah and i can accept that and there are there are some complications and stuff but it's the right thing to try to do definitely the lisa is um is i find is an attractive pension proposition to the self-employed because they get they get the basic rate tax relief but they can access it so from a cash flow concern which is the biggest concern of self-employed people is i might run out of money they can get the money just remove the penalty remove the penalty look and i was actually involved in the policy debate on creating the life center partly driven by the stuff i was writing in the pinch yeah so i'm pleased to say get rid of the penalty yeah though for taking money out i make the housing thing higher yes and there are some people who now find you're absolutely right you're finding themselves penalized just because of the way in which house prices yeah Yeah, because a 450 grand home for a 35-year-old with two kids might not be much in the South East.

32:47Yeah, because we saw, and the thinking behind the line, so in the thinking behind the new flexibilities we want on the ought and roll pension, the same. We have to, a lot of younger people just don't have the cushion that if there's a, you know, if you have a, it doesn't matter, if you lose your job for a time, you get some sudden unexpected household expense. a lot of people don't have that kind of basic cushion of 500 pounds a thousand pounds in an emergency and that's another pressure and we that's where we think be it uh lisa or indeed more flexibility yeah well you i get it i'm hearing what you're saying you're a very good advocate for both of you making the case right okay yeah yeah i mean i'm happy to talk off camera and like expose you to some of the feedback from the audience because it probably could inform some of your research and i think you are listened to and i know you've got torston as well who is like a probably a good friend of yours and someone who's got incredible influence over this space he's heavily involved yeah as a minister i think the one thing that social media can do that that that we found this when we interviewed nest who are a massive auto enrollment they basically said we have no idea how to speak to people i have i can speak to a million people a week easily and get their genuine thoughts you know i asked if you want questions answering i can get you that from the public.

34:06You may find the Resolution Foundation comes back to you and make sure we ought to test one or two ideas with you guys. I think that this is the thing that what people don't realise about social media is it's social. It's social media. There's a comment section, and you can ask a question of the audience, and they will give you lots of answers. And you will find highly intelligent people giving really well-thought-out arguments or discussion. But yeah, the ISO point, I know that they will want me to raise that, and I'm glad that you've listened, and thank you for that. The point around the 10K, so this is the kind of, it's like a social grant almost, or it's kind of like a, basically you're giving people under the age of 30, potentially 10 ,000 pounds or something.

34:50Sorry. Sorry. Miscusi. Yeah, miscusi. Yeah, yeah, sorry about that. Kind of like a, yeah, yeah. Band-aid. Yeah. Blaster. Yeah. Can you talk about what your thoughts are there, how you think that would help, and then can we just have a little conversation? And this is something that our Intergenerational Commission proposed. I've advocated it. And the thought is that, you know, in the past we've had other devices to try to make it easier for people to build up an asset. We had council house sales at discounted prices. When companies with the nationalized industries were being privatized, people could get shares at discounted prices.

35:26And because inheritance has become so important now, if you haven't got an inheritance coming, or you can't wait, because the average age when people receive an inheritance from their parents is now over 60. It's about 61, 62. We thought£10 ,000 could help people. either you could the obvious simplest thing to do is you could put it into your auto enrolled pension pot and link that to a bit more flexibility on withdrawing and using it as a basis for buying against it um you could use it as a deposit to when you were renting a flat or buying i know 10 000 of itself won't get you that uh you could use it for paying off some of your student debt so there were things you could do that we thought would really help people and and what i found most frustrating is some of the tv interviews that i did when we first proposed it the interviewers say but 10 000 pounds isn't anything you can't do much for 10 000 pounds 10 000 pounds doubles the wealth of well over half of all people age 30 it is actually quite significant when you are starting up yeah unless you spend it in vegas yeah i was gonna say depends on what they spend Yeah, yeah, yeah.

36:48You came up with the age 30 and under, right? Yeah, you're speaking to the... You're talking to some mid-30 of us. Can we make it 40 and under? Yeah, what about us? We just pull through the cracks. Well, you see, I think this is the kind of debate to have. I mean, we suggested 30. You could make it younger. You could make it older. 37 and under. 37, maybe. By the time it comes in, let's say 38, just in case it takes a while to implement. Because there is this thing of, you know, under 45. So, I mean, I bet there's 45-year-olds will be like, hold on. but 30 to 30 40 these are people that i graduated during the financial crisis yeah i have known nothing but like job markets in turmoil so to 30 and under you excluding a lot of people and my other concern is that there would be a large portion of the the society that forever would go you got 10 grand shut up you know like i didn't get 10 grand do you know i mean like the boomers maybe go what you want about oh who cares if society's crumbling and you've got to fight a war with Russia.

37:45You've got 10 grand, so you've got no problem. And then the millennials will be like, we didn't even get 10 grand. At least you guys got 10 grand. Stop complaining. But let me tell you again, let me give you another piece, another figure from our resolution foundation, which just shows what has happened to Britain since the crash in 2008. For someone in their early 60s in 2008, and then someone reached the same age about 10 years later, their wealth went up over those 10 years for the next cohort by£170 ,000. For someone in their early 30s in 2008, compared with someone in their early 30s 10 years later, their wealth went down by£30 ,000, which is a very big proportionate fall.

38:30So it looks as if the... So when those older people will say, hang on, you know,£10 ,000, You've actually, we're trying to offset a£30 ,000 fall in the assets of people in their early 30s since the crash. And that, I think, is another part of the challenge. And going back to what I said earlier about, you know, inheritance, although, of course, every parent is doing their best for their own kids, I don't want our kids to grow up in a kind of caste society where the only way to have any wealth is to have inherited it and there's low social mobility and you don't have the smartest people in the key jobs and everything I think helping give people just that tiny bit of extra cushion is worth it and I do like this idea that you put forward or you hinted at of being able to almost lend against your pension value for people from a deposit perspective there'll be lots of people out there where the most money they've got is locked in an account that they can't touch.

39:34So this ability to maybe have like a charge against it or lenders to say, you have this second charge or a charge. And I don't know, maybe it's repaid through the contributions or it's taken at the point they can access the pension. That might get them on. Exactly. We're not going into the detail, but you could imagine that this was another feature of a more flexible auto-enroll pot of money. And if you've got that money being built up in your pension. One very simple thing to do now that this mechanism is in place, you could put an extra £10 ,000 in for people, but with a bit more flexibility on borrowing against it or drawing on it in an emergency.

40:09So I do think we should just be bolder about spreading ownership of assets. We need to do something big and significant, because for many younger people, it's just so much harder than it was. So you wouldn't say just drop£10 ,000 in everyone's bank account? and let them stimmy checks in America yeah like exactly Shiba Inu just goes crazy Bitcoin goes to record heights so yeah you wouldn't just give 10 grand to people because I feel like that's not the best use of the money Damien had the idea give it to them to put in a sip when they're born and then it can compound for their whole lives which seems like a better value of money but if you give them 10 grand they're going to spend it in the pub in the bookies like on a holiday on in your car you can see T-Store out what I need to spend I just listed that on well easy put it all on red I've got 20 grand, let's go.

40:57Though actually, I have to say, you mustn't feed these caricatures of young people. My view of young people is young people are much more responsible and cautious than they used to be. And they don't drink as much. They're quite hardworking. So this picture of them, I think most of them would be horribly responsible. They'd listen to your podcast and work out what the best thing was to do with it. That is true. But then again, also, if they don't have much capital or that many assets, It might be like, pay off my student loan, pay off some debts, pay off this credit card. So it's just life. Just life's little, fix my car.

41:31So all these little things. And as I said, even since when we first proposed this idea a few years back, the growth and the success of auto-enrolment, as I say, has meant that we've now got a vehicle that you could use with a bit of extra flexibility alongside. That's a great idea. You say about being bold, and Torsten Bell used to work with you. Does he still work with the Resolution Foundation or is he just full on? Yeah, no, he now has all the responsibilities of being a minister. But he carries those ideas into government and he's rising quickly through the Labour Party. He's now, is he a pensions minister?

42:06Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. So how much of the ideas do you think he's carrying? I know he deleted the tweets around ISIS. He's a smart guy, Johnson. Yeah, yeah, he needs to back out of that one. Yeah, maybe he read the comments. So, yeah, our government, listening to what you're saying, is he being influential in that sense? Is he pushing bold ideas around pensions? Well, Torsten is a very smart and effective guy, and I'm sure that he's got a broad range of experience. I'm sure he's drawing on it all as well as a minister. But he is, of course, an independent person. He has no links to Resolution Foundation as an organisation now.

42:49In his career, he's worked in the Treasury, as well. So I hope he's drawing on some of this analysis. But you find when you are on the inside in government, and I used to run a think tank and then I was a minister, you find when you're inside in government, there are constraints. Sometimes you discover some things are very hard to do in practice. The administrative structures aren't what you thought they would be. You're quite heavily constrained by what's feasible. That's another reason why I do think these sort of auto-enroll pension parts are a great opportunity. But I'm sure Torsten's commitment to boosting the growth rate and boosting living standards, the things we've worked on at Resolution, I'm sure he's absolutely sticking with that.

43:31Yeah. Well, I hope there's some bold thinkers. Don't touch the ice this day. The£10 ,000, where would that money come from? Well, that's where, let's get it into perspective. There's roughly about 700 ,000, 750 ,000 people a year in these kind of cohorts we're talking about. So you're talking, and if it's 10 ,000 pounds per person, that's seven to eight billion pounds a year. Now, the government spends over a trillion pounds a year, so it's not an absolutely massive amount. But we, again, as a very scrupulous resolution foundation, we don't propose things without identifying areas where you need to raise the taxes.

44:16We do think that the arguments for having, collecting a bit more in inheritance tax, part of the thinking on the ISIS, which I'm going to have to go back and reconsider in the light of all your points, was how you could raise money to put into funding things like a capital grant. But it is not a massive, although£10 ,000 for these individuals would be a lot, in terms of the overall finances, it is a cost, but it is less than 1 % of public spending. Yeah, and how impactful it would be to the individual would be massive versus it's not like hundreds of billions of pounds. What about things like, are there other areas that we could raise this money without targeting, say, savings or inheritance?

44:57council tax? Yeah, I think council tax is a great example. And the council tax has ended up much more regressive than it was when it started because they haven't revalued the bands. And of course, it's paid by renters. So you've got people on relatively low incomes in quite low value properties paying council tax. And then you've got people whose properties are worth a hell of a lot whose council tax is not that high. So yeah, I do think that the upper bands, there's a massive gap in the upper bands now where you could raise more on high value properties. Again, I fully understand there's a problem of people who may be asset rich and cash poor.

45:44And I do think for people in those circumstances, you may need some kind of arrangements if you really got serious of a kind of charge on the estate, again, rather than expecting them necessarily to write in a check per year. But yeah, council tax is too hard on low value properties and very lax on high value properties. I think as soon as people hear council tax, they think, oh, my three bed semi-detached, did council tax go up? But that's probably not what we're speaking about. And unfortunately, when taxes go up, someone is losing because it's the nature of, this kind of money's got to come, hasn't it?

46:15But it's these houses that are 10 million plus, 20 million or things in Mayfair that no one even lives in. and people are paying like 400 quid a month or 300 quid a month for council tax whereas their staff bill is 200 grand a year you know and the thing i notice i cycle around and when i'm cycling home from westminster you're going through some you're absolutely right those kind of blocks of flats that are very high value what always shocks me is how few lights they're empty yeah they're just places to park cash and these people have got a house in new york and dubai and london and if you said to them the council tax 200 grand a year they'll pay it yeah because they're They're not buying the house to live in it.

46:51They're buying it to park cash in countries. And you notice it. There's a security guard or someone in the reception and there's not much lights on above. So, yeah, I do think that that's an area where we can look at reform. Because overall, what has happened, even though property, the value of assets, has increased to seven times national income from three times, the amount that we collect in tax on capital has not increased by the same amount. Now, it's difficult and you've got to be very careful. But that's, we should, I think we've probably got the balance between taxing earnings and income relative to taxing assets.

47:36We haven't got it quite right. I don't believe in an overall wealth tax. I don't think we've got a national register of everybody's individual wealth. But when there are specific things like houses and council tax, that's where we can tighten up. I just want to point out for the listeners, you're part of the Conservative Party, aren't you? I am indeed. I take the Tory whip in the House of Lords. I can just imagine the comments being like, oh, he's left and all that. I mean, people will, people, I think that's important context that you sit on that side of the political spectrum. And then Torsten is now obviously in Labour.

48:04And Resolution was a cross-party think tank. Torsten had links to the Labour Party. I had links to the Conservative Party. But the way I say it to my Conservative friends is Conservatives believe in a property-owning democracy. We believe in spreading home ownership, and that's both council house sales and the privatised shares were examples of that. We need simply imaginative thinking to spread property ownership to the younger generation now. So I don't see this as a particularly sort of issue with a party divide. I think any serious political party should follow the overwhelming evidence that the younger people are having a raw deal and try to do something about it.

48:43And to be honest, if different political parties are competing with rival ideas about what to do to help young people, that would be fine by me. What do you think the political appetite or do they even understand this problem? Are they looking to tackle it in a meaningful sense? Yeah, I think there is a recognition. And look, there's several things happening. One is younger people just aren't voting the way that they used to. And that's partly because politicians aren't engaging with them and offering. It's also partly because it's so hard to register to vote if you're moving around in private rent accommodation.

49:17And look, if you're sitting in the Conservative Party, you can see that the Conservative vote is heavily concentrated amongst people over 60. And the Conservative Party has been around for 200 years. And it'd be quite good if it could carry on as a centre-right political party. So it's got to have something to offer to people of working age and younger people. Yeah. I mean, you're still a member of the party, right? I mean, do you think it's doing that at the minute? Well, it's now heavily in opposition, you know, down to 120 MPs. I do think that one of the lessons from the landslide defeat is that the Conservative Party needs to make an offer that younger people can engage with.

49:58And I think that the leadership are interested in that. And as I say, you can pitch the capital grant in lots of different ways. I think spreading property ownership amongst younger people should absolutely be what Tories offer. Indeed, after the 1945 Labour landslide victory, the Conservative Party recovered surprisingly fast and was back in 1951. And when you look at the big offer that the Conservative Party made to get back, it was around house building and home ownership. It was an attempt to offer something to the next generation. Why do you think then that, say, Labour, as an example, their policy centre around, we're not going to tax workers, but we're going to tax workers through employers and are, you know, we raise it on that side and then it'll feed through anyway, rather than going, let's look at council tax, let's be bold, let's reform, revalue, you know, why is it?

50:50It doesn't feel like the conversation coming out is reflective of what you're saying. Yeah, look, Labour can make their own case. To be honest, what shocked me most about the way they did that employer increase was lowering the threshold from£10 ,000 to£5 ,000. So it hit people in quite low paid jobs. And I do think there's a real danger when this stuff comes in that it has an effect on them. And I'm, you know, maybe because I operate from the safety of a think tank in the House of Lords, I can say things, it's much harder, I completely understand you're facing real voters. But the fact is, this is a British government that is still having to borrow a hell of a lot of money.

51:37We have to accept that part of the way forward is to find ways in which we can raise taxes in fair and acceptable ways. And I think that we should, one of the reasons why I think there was a, one of the reasons why actually I supported some of the reductions in employee national insurance is that was a tax cut directly focused on people of working age in work i think it was a very that's an effective way of of helping people just feels like a lot of uh tinkering around the edges constantly you know and the like there feels like there's better taxes to go up from from my perspective council tax but we won't talk about that anymore let's let's talk about um student debt because obviously how much how much do you owe to i finally paid off my first student loan but my second one i I earned them like 30 grand.

52:33I think, yeah. Yeah, that's for your higher education. For my MBA. But the first one, I just paid off like last year. Yeah. My first student loan. We were quite unique in a sense of when we were at university and in our third year, we were paying three and a half grand or something, but there were people in the first year doing the same course paying nine grand. Right. We saw the crossover. Yep. I know that you were around and part of that decision. I know I liked you until I found out. I was like, you're such a cool guy. He's got great ideas and then he made me pay loads of student fees. so thanks do you do you know your your thing is we want to help the the poorest in in society the poorest are the people that that have to borrow to go to university they're also the people that then have to work while they're at uni because the loans won't cover the cost of the university i was the same is i it paid for my accommodation if i wanted to eat i still had to get a job do you think that that was a good decision do you think it's worked out well and i have to first of all i completely take responsibility i wrote this book the pinch i've And the first edition of The Pinch came out.

53:31Now I go into the coalition government as universities and science minister, and as universities minister, then put up the fees and the loans. So I have to tackle that head on. I think in the circumstances, I kept on battling to get across the message, this student loan is not like a credit card debt or an overdraft. And it's paid back at 9 % on your earnings. Now, the latest figure is above about£25 ,000 a year. So it is not a, when you think about how much that means for someone earning£30 ,000 a year, which is kind of where a graduate on average gets to by the time they're age 30. No, it is not shockingly overexpensive.

54:17I mean, it is, we're talking about perhaps£75 or so a month. So I tried to make, and we increased the repayment threshold, so it should not be a big slice of your income as a graduate. And of course, a lot of parents say, but the$50 ,000 debt or the$30 ,000 of debt, that's taken into account by the mortgage lender. It's not. I did have these conversations with the mortgage lenders before we did it, and they regard it as a fixed outgoing. They treat it like income tax. Graduate tax. Yeah, they don't say that's a$50 ,000 in your overdraft which is$50 ,000 low mortgage you take out. So it's a fixed out gain.

54:54So for those reasons, I do think in the circumstances when we were having to reduce public spending and there are lots of taxpayers who earn less than graduates, I think it's a defensible thing to do. I will stand by you there and say that the thing that people need to understand is it's not how much you owe, it's how much you pay because of the fact that the debt is wiped at the end. And it's only those who end up with good jobs who end up paying a lot. And people who have good jobs, I hate that term, sorry, high paid jobs, what is a good job? You can be a bin man, you're doing a great service.

55:28But if you end up being a bin man and you end up on lower pay, you won't even potentially pay back the amount for the education. But people just see the headline figure, don't they? Yeah. And if you think, I mean, so I think for the taxpayer, I think the deal is if you end up in a well paid job, you'll pay back. but the taxpayers will probably end up paying for about a quarter of the cost of higher education and saying that the way we'll divvy it up is that the the graduates who end up in the well-paid jobs will pay but if for whatever reason you don't the taxpayers will pay and we'll write it off and that's about 25 that seems to me to be a fair deal it's be fair just when you're a graduate and you get your first job you're like yay i got my first paycheck then you're like national insurance uh employee contribution pension contribution and then student loan you're like where's all my money gone so and then you've got to pay rent and then you'll decide i'm left with like nothing so it's just like another line on your uh pay slip that's just that's what people don't understand they like you know i mean i think my mom told me to go to university because she was part of a generation where if you went to university you were made my generation everyone went to university and that piece of paper holds not that much weight it feels in the job market and i know you like Like if you're a top graduate at a top university, amazing.

56:44But I do worry that a lot of people go, oh, let's just go uni and have a three-year piss up. And then you end up, because I was 18, I was irresponsible. I went to Durham as well, which is a good uni, right? We graduated in the credit crunch. And then my second degree, I graduated in lockdown. And even though it was Durham, it was a good university, so many of my classmates ended up working in like pubs, Deliveroo, like just all these jobs, waitresses, because there were no jobs when we graduated. So you spend all that money, you graduate, you're like, oh, I've got a degree, I've got a B, I've got a first, second, whatever.

57:17And then you can't get a job because we're in lockdown. Yeah, and I know lockdown was tough. This is quite dangerous stuff, because the fact is, and I follow the evidence, look into it very closely, the graduates do still, on average, earned significantly more than non-graduates. And also, although certainly, especially early on, you may well be trying out different jobs, you may have internships, sometimes unpaid internships, where they bloody well should be playing the minimum wage, we know all that. But your long-run route is one which is better for your earnings and job prospects than, sadly, for people who are not graduates.

57:54And I think the media coverage about going to university has become too negative. We're now at the position where by the age of 25, 40 % of young people who did not go to university regret it. 40 % regret it. Whereas if you ask the people who went to university by that age, 8 % regret that they went to university. Yes. What graduates tend to regret is the course they chose. And looking back, because of this early specialization in England, they may well think, I wish I'd done a different subject. Not that many say, I just wish I'd not gone. It's the real problem, the much bigger proportion, is the non-graduates say, looking back, I can see now from what my friends who went to university are doing, I wish I had gone as well.

58:39So it is still quite a good thing for young people to do, and in this system they don't have to pay up front. Yeah, I think the one thing is that a lot of jobs require an university education, so there's a barrier there, isn't there? there's you know it's a way to exclude people isn't it they look at cvs and go well you've got a university education you haven't it's like a screening process you need at least a 2-1 to apply for this job this kind of chat so i'm not surprised that they end up because the better jobs have stricter requirements but i do think it's it's kind of like a chicken and egg situation where you have to get the degree to get the job and i wonder if there was a better place where if they said to me damien don't go uni go traveling for a couple of years and you'll have a better of time and when you come back you can get an apprenticeship and go through this program because i worked in sales and everyone around me the best sales people had just been there longer they didn't have educations and they're earning loads of money you know yeah but if you look at but the interesting thing is if you look at degree apprenticeships for example which you've got very fashionable if you look at them you find um they are a big charge on the apprenticeship levy that's another fixed pot of money the money that's collected from employers for training and so people going on degree apprenticeships who tend to be older are growing and the number of people age 16 or 18 on level two or level three apprenticeships is falling so we are taking the resource that should have gone to a rather different group and I have to say we monitor very closely opportunity and fair access for going to university in a way that's not done for apprenticeships and people going to university compared with people doing the same sort of of degree apprenticeships.

1:00:20The degree apprenticeships are more white, more male, less likely to have been on free school meals. Universities are actually more open and accessible than degree apprenticeships are. The hardest thing I found with university, coming from a background where it's just me and my single, my mother, like we lived in inner city Birmingham. I went to Durham and it was my first exposure ever to kind of, oh shit, people have got money. I thought my mate Wazim, his dad had like a 10-year-old beamer. I was like, he's rich. I got there and those kids were like brand new beamers. And I was like, whoa. But anyway, I wasn't trained in the art of university.

1:00:58I didn't understand that I needed to get a work experience before I went. I didn't really know anything about the game. I just thought, oh, if I turn up and I do the education, I'll get a job. And I wasn't, you know, polished, as they might call it, you know. But you don't have to be. And I think you've just made part of the case for university. it is where you meet a much wider mix of people i agree and actually another thing i was gonna say lucky lucky to meet me that's because you guys met at university i love you i love uni i went twice because i loved it so much yeah now i employ him yeah so i kind of get some defined contributions yeah i guess the contributions to my pension man you need to define the benefit to me first yeah well i think it's it does do that and another thing that worries me because you're right what worries me is the cash pressures of students living away from home and the if we just if we end up with everyone as a commuter student who doesn't move away from university then they miss out on some of the benefits and one of the statistics is the more affluent you are the further away from your home your university is so actually your traveling from birmingham to durham is a great thing and quite unusual i was pretty poor yeah

1:02:15I think we should either bring back means-tested maintenance grants, put in a bigger maintenance loan. And there is a deal to be done because the 9 ,000 fees aren't enough now to ensure you have a good quality higher education. So I think that needs to go up. But the repayment terms don't change. So graduates won't pay more per year. And then put a bit of money into helping students with their living costs. because I do worry the number of students that doing a few hours work is fine. It might even mean you have to sort of organise your life a bit better. But the evidence is if you're going above a day or two working, it's actually starting to affect your ability to study and also do all the social things.

1:02:58And the social stuff, which is like the key thing, the key benefit I got out of it was, you know, just... You find yourself a bit in uni, but you have a lot of fun. Yeah, did you get into broadcasting? And were you doing student journalism? and no no that isn't how you're going to podcast i was drinking i was drinking in bars and we met in a bar he was on stage going wait wait and i was like i like this guy that's a cool white boy i didn't do any i didn't do any of that stuff yeah i didn't get the you know like all the people are oh i loved all the free clubs and things like this and i was like oh i missed all that no i what i rode i rode so i used to go straight from the club at 5 a.m with a gin with with a gin and tonic and then get in the boat and row and puke all over the side of the boat and that was unique yeah see that's memory that's character building that's character building it was good please remember this is not financial advice like we say a lot on the podcast investments can fall and rise in fact it's pretty much a guarantee past performance is no guarantee of future results so your money is at risk with investing and other fees may apply as with everything financial please do your own research.

1:04:05We really encourage that because no one cares more about your money than you. I'm Damo. Banti. This was an episode of Making Money from Our Company Most. It was film and edited by the team at Flow Spire, Jack and Ben. It was produced by Ruth Edwards and brought together by Will Stollerman. What about Ruth and Toothless a Dog? Yeah, shout out them too.