By Mike Hedges AM

On 17^th April 2023 we succeeded in getting Educational Maintenance Allowance  (EMA) increased in Wales. It was a long battle involving questions, a statement of opinion which had only seven supporters and a Member debate in the Senedd to get it increased.

Sixth form and college students from low income households will now receive a £10 grant increase to help with travel and food costs, the Welsh government  has announced.

EMA had been frozen at £30 for nearly 20 years. The new higher payment is available from the beginning of the summer term. The challenge now is to get it indexed-linked as other means-tested payments are.

I want to highlight firstly the importance of EMA and secondly the importance of increasing it in line with inflation.

Of course, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats opposed it when it was introduced by the Labour Westminster Government. The Liberal Democrat education spokesperson, Phil Willis, said: “There are significantly more important things to do with £20m than give young people a Christmas bonus.”

Conservative spokesperson Chris Grayling said: ‘This is another blatant example of the government trying to fiddle the figures. Bribing young people to sign up for courses they may not complete, might make ministers’ targets look achievable — but they do absolutely nothing to help solve this country’s… skills shortage.”

I think that tells you what the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats at Westminster think of our young people, and think of people who are less well off.

The Westminster Government and the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition took only until 20th October 2010 to end the EMA scheme in England, because they don’t believe in it. They do not believe in helping young people.

This is why we need a more representative Parliaments, so that we have people with different life experiences, who understand from their own experience the benefit of EMA-type support.

I congratulated the Welsh Government on keeping the EMA when it had been cancelled in England. It would have been so easy to cancel it. There you had a simple saving. It would generate very little noise because the people who get these sorts of payments are not the people who write letters to the press or organise petitions. They’re not the people who go out complaining; they’re the people who suffer and have problems.

I would like to go through some details from my experience as a college lecturer. Without EMA, many students would not have been able to undertake their studies. Many more, driven by their family’s economic circumstances, would, at some stage, have had to drop out.

Many of my former students ended up in well-paid ICT jobs, helping both them and the economy. EMA was the difference between unemployment followed by low-skilled and low-paid employment and becoming skilled and well paid. EMA was and is life-changing for many people.

It also benefits our economy, increasing the number of skilled workers. This is investing in young people, investing in our economy and it is one of the best forms of investment in economic development. Contrast this with bribing companies to bring their branch factories to Wales, which has failed for as long as I can remember – just think about Bosch and LG.

My experience as a college lecturer was that any student who attended regularly or who had a good reason for not being there and who was making good progress was not going to be stopped getting their EMA.

The Bevan Foundation estimate the cost of an inflation-linked increase will be around £1.7 million. Raising the eligibility to include another 1,000 students would cost £1.1 million. This is obviously affordable from the Welsh Government budget. The Finance Committee discussed this and were unanimously in favour of such an uplift, including the Conservative Member.

If anyone doubts its affordability, just check every month how much additional money is released by the Welsh Government to good and deserving recipients: £1 million here, £5 million there – you get them every few weeks. My argument is that giving money to EMA students is giving it to good and deserving recipients.

Finally, thank you to the Welsh Labour Government, which kept the EMA and has now increased it. Now is the time to start annual uplifts.

Mike Hedges is the member of the Welsh Senedd for Swansea East.

Image: Mike Hedges. Author: Steve Cushen, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.