Jeremy Corbyn is "looking into ways" to reduce student debt for people who have already left uni

Jeremy Corbyn has said he’s “looking at ways” to help reduce student debt for people who have already been and gone from university.

Corbyn has already pledged in his manifesto to abolish all tuition fees from 2018, as well as write off first-year fees for anyone starting university in September 2017.

The policy is part of Labour’s wider education reforms, which also seek to deliver smaller class sizes, free school meals for all students, and provide students and teachers with better access to resources. 

Corbyn told The Independent that the party are looking into freeing students from the often crippling debt they accumulated after the coalition government increased fees. 

“We’ve not got a policy or proposal on it,” he said. “There wasn’t time between the announcement of the election and the publication of the manifesto.

“But I do understand that point and I’m entirely sympathetic to it.” 

He later told the NME that there is a “huge block” of students with massive debt and that he is “looking at ways we could reduce that, ameliorate that, lengthen the period of paying it off or some other means of reducing that debt burden.

“I don’t have the simply answer for it at this stage – I don’t think anybody would expect me to, because this election was called unexpectedly, we had two weeks to prepare all of this – but I’m very well aware of that problem.”