Sixth form students quiz Salisbury parliamentary candidates at hustings

The debate, hosted by Salisbury Sixth Form College, was attended by candidates from all parties except UKIP. Matthew Dean, chairman of Salisbury Conservatives, took the place of Conservative candidate John Glen who could not attend.

Vice-principal, Richard Davis acted as compere for the evening.

Student Holly Sherburne asked, considering Labour’s plans to abolish university tuition fees, how the other parties would keep education affordable for students from lower income families.

Tom Corbin (Labour) thanked her for touching on a key manifesto policy and said Labour also planned to create “proper apprenticeships that lead to real work”, end zero-hours contracts and raise the living wage to £10 per hour by 2020.

Mr Dean said tuition fees had been introduced by the last Labour government and increased by the Liberal Democrats under the Coalition government.

He said: “It was a difficult decision, it has been unpopular but at the end of this somebody’s got to pay, and if it’s not going to be the people who benefit from the education, it’s going to be the people with far less means.”

Green Party candidate Brig Oubridge said: “We think it’s scandalous that the people who have benefitted from years of free education are giving this generation £40,000 of debt.”

He said: “We want more equality in education, not education for those who can afford it and those who come from the best homes.”

Liberal Democrat Paul Sample said his party would re-instate maintenance grants and called for universities to be more open “about the way they select their students”, and end the issue that “some people went to the right school and get a leg up”.

Nahtanha Wright asked the panel if it was fair that “someone who is older, and in blunt terms, will die soon should have more of a right to vote than someone like me who these decisions will affect” and asked if the voting age should be lowered to 16.

Mr Dean said: “I don’t think it is fair, actually” adding that he would lower the voting age, but said he did not “back the idea” that older people couldn’t vote.

Mr Oubridge agreed the voting age should be 16 and said lowering the voting age for the 2014 Scottish independence referendum “did a wonderful job of bringing young people into the political process”.

Independent candidate King Arthur Pendragon simply said: “The reality is you’re right, you should be able to vote at 16” and Mr Sample added that it was a policy in the Liberal Democrat manifesto to lower the age to 16.

Mr Corbin agreed, and said the Labour party had made representations that 16-year-olds should have been allowed to vote in this election.

The next question, from Thomas Brown, was about the candidates’ stance on zero-hours contracts.

He said: “In my opinion these allow part-time workers to get the flexible hours they need.”

Mr Oubridge said zero-hours contracts “shouldn’t be allowed” but said flexibility should be encouraged and said the Green Party wanted to introduce a “basic income” for everybody.

He said this “would give tax-payers a tax-free allowance and give people who were not working a benefit that was a basic income” and allow people to choose how much they work to “top it up”.

But Mr Pendragon said: “It was exactly that policy that caused me to leave the Green Party, because I didn’t think it was costed and I didn’t think it would work.”

He said he would not make zero-hours contracts illegal but would not make them “obligatory”, and called for a system where “those who want to work flexible hours can, and those that don’t want to don’t have to.”

Mr Sample said his party was committed to “stamping out” zero-hours contracts, and said they had “gone too far”.

He said Salisbury had a “double whammy” of “low wages and being an expensive place to live” and he wanted to “reduce the amount between how much people were paid and how much they needed to pay out”.

Mr Corbin called it a “scandalous culture” and said zero-hours contracts “shouldn’t be the expectation” for people leaving education.

Mr Dean told Mr Brown: “I agree with you at the premise of your question” but said he did not agree with Mr Oubridge on “the concept that everybody, regardless of their circumstances, should be paid by the state a basic income”.

He said: “You can imagine the catastrophic effect that would have on the economy.

“If there was a magic money tree where we could print money and give it to each other we would all do it.”

Student Lara Gardiner asked how care for the elderly would be kept “sustainable and efficient, while still ensuring that people who have worked hard all their lives to pay taxes and own their own home are fairly cared for by the state”.

Mr Pendragon said he believed “that anyone who has worked their life for this country should be looked after” adding that there would be a role for the government as well as a role for the community.

Mr Sample said his father spent the last 18 months of his life being cared for by a nurse from the Philippines and a nurse from Czechoslovakia “who the government will not give certainty to now we are going for a hard Brexit”, and said it was “a shaming, shaming thing for the Conservatives to have done”. He said having two budgets for NHS care and one for residential care was “nonsense” and that the Liberal Democrats were campaigning to combine this into one service.

Mr Corbin said the state pension was “quite minimal” and didn’t amount to pensioners “living the life of luxury” and that Labour would retain free bus passes, keep the retirement age at 66 and create a “joined-up, fully integrated care system”.

Mr Dean said: “The reality is that it’s today’s tax-payers that are keeping yesterday’s and today’s retired” and that the next government should “remember that the elderly are very important but we need a bit of etiquette here so that all generations are contributing fairly”.

Mr Oubridge said the idea that “today’s tax-payers pay today’s pensions” was true, adding: “It’s always been true and said it was “a contributory system” and “a social contract”.

He added: “Our elderly people deserve to be looked after.”