Sort out the Student Loans Company

Stuart King, Labour's general election candidate for Putney and
Roehampton, has launched a campaign to overhaul the Student
Loans Company (SLC) following the debacle that left 150,000 without finance at the start of September.

Stuart wrote to both the Chief Executive of the SLC and the Vice Chancellor of Roehampton University, Paul O'Prey, to make sure students were able to register for classes, get housed and limit the financial hardship suffered by late payment of grants and loans.

In his letter to SLC Chief Executive Ralph Seymour-Jackson, Stuart called the mistakes by his organisation "abject incompetence on any number of levels." This followed revelations that despite over a million new grant or loan applications, the SLC took on just 120 extra staff to deal with them all.

Stuart said: "The original mistake by the SLC was made worse by their failure to staff phone help lines or provide any useful help on their website. The SLC only has two roles: to pay money to students and to reclaim it from graduates. It's never been very good at the second, causing graduates stress and wasting time; but the fact it now can't pay out either makes it unfit for purpose."

Stuart is campaigning for a number of reforms to sort out the SLC:

I'm backing Stuart King's campaign to sort out the Student Loans Company. I call for an urgent inquiry into the failure to pay student financial packages on time. This can never happen again.

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