Tom Gordon’s Student Finance (Review) Bill Would Force a Full Review of Plan 2 Repayment Terms
The Harrogate and Knaresborough MP won leave to bring in his Ten-Minute Rule Bill on 15 September 2026. Here is what it says, what it would change for your repayments, and why bills introduced this way almost never become law
Key Takeaways
- Nothing changes for you today. The Bill orders a review. It does not move a threshold, cut an interest rate or shorten a write-off period. Even if it were passed in full tomorrow, your deductions next payday would be identical.
- Tom Gordon, the Liberal Democrat MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, was granted leave to bring in the Student Finance (Review) Bill on 15 September 2026. The House agreed without a division, and the Bill was ordered to be printed as Bill 151.
- The Bill would require the Secretary of State, not the Chancellor, to review student finance in England, covering repayment arrangements and thresholds, the terms borrowers were originally sold, and the link between thresholds and average earnings.
- It is a Ten-Minute Rule Bill. Parliament’s own description of the category is that such bills are “often an opportunity for Members to voice an opinion… rather than a serious attempt to get a bill passed”. A second reading is listed for Friday 15 January 2027, which is a date in the diary rather than a promise of debating time.
- Twelve Members from four parties presented it, and the Bill landed the same afternoon the Treasury Committee Chair made a Commons statement on the Government’s response to her committee’s student loans report.
In this article
What the Bill Would Actually Do
Start with the answer most readers want. If the Student Finance (Review) Bill received Royal Assent tomorrow, your student loan repayment would not change by a single penny. The Bill does not touch the £29,385 Plan 2 threshold, the 9% repayment rate, the interest you are charged or the 30-year write-off. It orders a review.
That is not a criticism of the Bill, it is what the Bill is for. A backbench MP cannot legislate a threshold rise into existence; spending decisions of that kind are the Government’s. What a backbencher can do is try to put a statutory duty on a minister to look at the question and report back. That is the lever Tom Gordon reached for on 15 September 2026.
The Bill in one sentence
A Bill to require the Secretary of State to review student finance in England, with that review obliged to consider repayment arrangements and thresholds, the terms and conditions that applied to loans when they were issued, and the relationship between repayment thresholds and average earnings.
One detail worth getting right, because early coverage did not: the Bill names the Secretary of State, not the Treasury or the Chancellor. Student finance policy in England sits with the Department for Education, even though the threshold freeze that triggered all of this was announced by a Chancellor at a Budget. If you are searching for “Tom Gordon Treasury review student loans”, that is the Bill you have found, but the duty it would create falls on the Education Secretary.
The Bill was granted leave without a vote. In the words of the Official Report: Question put and agreed to. That is not a sign of Government support. It is the normal outcome when nobody stands up to oppose a Ten-Minute Rule motion, which is most of the time.
What a Ten-Minute Rule Bill Is
This is the part that decides how much weight to give the story, so it is worth doing properly rather than skipping.
A Ten-Minute Rule Bill is one of the four routes a backbench MP has to introduce a Private Members’ Bill. The MP gets roughly ten minutes at the despatch box, just after Question Time on a Tuesday or Wednesday, to argue for leave to bring in a bill. Another Member may speak against for a similar length of time. The House then decides whether to grant leave. If it does, the bill is formally introduced, read a first time, printed, and given a nominal second reading date.
Parliament’s own words: UK Parliament classifies this Bill as a “Private Members’ Bill (under the Ten Minute Rule)” and describes the category like this: “Ten Minute Rule bills are often an opportunity for Members to voice an opinion on a subject or aspect of existing legislation, rather than a serious attempt to get a bill passed.” That is the institution describing its own procedure, not a cynic’s gloss on it.
What the 15 September sitting actually produced
| Step | Status |
|---|---|
| Leave to bring in the Bill | Granted, 15 September 2026, without a division |
| First reading | Completed, 15 September 2026 |
| Ordered to be printed | Yes, as Bill 151 |
| Second reading | Listed for Friday 15 January 2027, not yet debated |
| Committee, report, Lords stages | None reached |
Stage record as published by the UK Parliament Bills service for Bill 4300. At the time of writing, no bill text had yet been published on the parliamentary website, so the long title is the only authoritative statement of what the Bill contains.
First reading is a formality. It involves no debate and no vote on the substance. The meaningful test is second reading, and for a Ten-Minute Rule Bill that test is rarely reached, for the reason set out in the next section.
The Four Things the Review Must Cover
The long title is short, and every clause in it is doing work. Read it as four obligations.
1. Review student finance in England
The duty is England-only. Student finance is devolved, so a Welsh Plan 2 borrower, a Scottish Plan 4 borrower or a Northern Irish Plan 1 borrower would not be covered by the review this Bill requires, even though Wales still issues Plan 2 loans. If you are unsure which plan you hold, check with our which student loan plan am I on guide.
2. Consider loan repayment arrangements and thresholds
This is the limb that points straight at the Plan 2 threshold, currently £29,385 and due to stay there from April 2027 until April 2030. “Arrangements” is broad enough to take in the 9% repayment rate and the way repayments are collected through PAYE as well.
3. Consider the terms and conditions that applied when loans were issued
This is the retrospection limb, and it is the most unusual thing in the Bill. It would oblige the review to look backwards at what borrowers were told at the point of signing, not just at what the rules say now. It maps directly onto the Treasury Committee’s mis-selling findings, covered in our report on the Treasury Committee student loans report.
4. Consider the relationship between thresholds and average earnings
The most consequential limb if anything ever came of it. Plan 2 was sold on the basis that the threshold would track earnings. Reconnecting the two is the single change that would cut repayments for existing borrowers, and it is the one the next section puts numbers against.
What is not in the Bill: no write-off of balances, no compensation scheme, no switch from RPI to CPI, no cut to the 9% rate, no deadline by which the review must report, and no obligation on the Secretary of State to act on whatever the review finds. Anyone telling you this Bill would wipe or refund student debt is misreading it.
Will It Become Law? Almost Certainly Not
Being straight about this is more useful than being encouraging. Ten-Minute Rule Bills very rarely become law, and the reason is arithmetic rather than politics.
Why the odds are long
- Private Members’ Bills are debated on a handful of sitting Fridays each session, and ballot bills get first call on that time
- A Ten-Minute Rule Bill joins the queue behind them, so its listed second reading date usually passes without the Bill being reached
- A single objection on the floor is enough to stop an unreached bill in its tracks
- Without Government backing, a bill that has not been reached simply falls when the session ends
What it can still achieve
- Ten minutes of chamber time immediately after Question Time, which is the best-attended slot of the day
- A permanent, citable entry in the Official Report and on the parliamentary Bills register
- A cross-party list of names attached to a specific demand
- Pressure on ministers ahead of a Budget, which is where a threshold decision is actually taken
The second reading date of Friday 15 January 2027 should be read in that light. It is the date the Bill is listed for, not a debate that has been scheduled and guaranteed. Whether it is reached depends on what sits ahead of it in the queue on the day.
Higher education specialists have also been sceptical that pressure of this kind will shift policy. Academics quoted by Times Higher Education after the Government’s response pointed to the absence of spare public money, with competing demands from social care and defence, as the binding constraint on any Plan 2 reform. The realistic route to a threshold change remains a Chancellor deciding to fund one at a Budget.
What the Freeze Costs You Meanwhile
While the Bill sits in the queue, the rules it wants reviewed carry on applying. Here is where a Plan 2 borrower actually stands, using the figures in force for 2026-27.
On a salary of £35,000, that means 9% of the £5,615 you earn above the threshold, or about £505 a year, roughly £42.11 a month. Interest above £29,385 slides upwards with income to a ceiling of 6% at £52,885 and above.
The size of the argument, illustrated
The Bill’s fourth limb is about reconnecting the threshold to average earnings. To show what is at stake, the table below applies this site’s own long-run average-earnings assumption of 2% a year to the frozen threshold. This is an illustration on a stated assumption, not a forecast, and not a figure from the Bill or from any official source. Nobody has published what the threshold would have been.
| Tax year from | Frozen threshold | If uprated at 2% | Extra repaid that year |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 2027 | £29,385 | £29,973 | about £53 |
| April 2028 | £29,385 | £30,572 | about £107 |
| April 2029 | £29,385 | £31,184 | about £162 |
Over the three frozen years that comes to roughly £322 more repaid than an earnings-linked threshold would have taken, for anyone earning comfortably above the threshold throughout. It is a real cost, and it is also small enough to explain why the Treasury has not felt compelled to reverse the freeze.
Work out your own position: run your salary through the monthly repayment calculator, read the full mechanics in the Plan 2 threshold freeze guide, or see how the freeze compounds against pay rises with the career progression calculator. The rules on our Plan 2 page are the ones that apply, Bill or no Bill.
What Gordon Told the Commons
Gordon opened by declaring an interest: he holds both a Plan 2 loan and a postgraduate loan, and told the House his combined balance stands at more than £65,000. He said 15p of every extra pound he earns goes on repayments, on top of tax, which is the combined effect of repaying 9% on Plan 2 and 6% on a postgraduate loan at the same time.
“The poorer your family, the more you have to borrow. In 2016, maintenance grants for poorer students were scrapped and replaced with loans, so the students who have the least borrow the most, graduate with the biggest debts, and are then charged interest on every penny. A system that was meant to be a ladder of opportunity has become a penalty for being born poor. That is not social mobility; it is social injustice, with interest.”
“It was sold like a phone contract, and paid back like a second income tax. No other lender in this country would be allowed to sell a loan to an 18-year-old on one set of terms, only to rewrite them when the ink was barely even dry. If a bank did that, the regulator would shut it down. When the Government do it, they call it a policy change.”
Tom Gordon MP, House of Commons, 15 September 2026
He was careful to spread the blame. Every party that has been in government, he said, has a shoddy record on the issue, the Liberal Democrats included, and nobody comes to the debate with clean hands. That framing is deliberate: the Bill’s only realistic path runs through cross-party consensus.
Gordon anchored the broken-promise argument in the Official Report, quoting the Universities Minister telling the House on 3 November 2010 that the threshold would rise “periodically” to reflect average earnings and that “the Government are committed to the progressive nature of the repayment system”. He also noted that ministers “wrote themselves out of the Consumer Credit Act 2006”, which is why the Treasury Committee’s mis-selling finding creates no route to redress.
On the Government’s reply to that committee report, Gordon quoted its central formula, that ministers keep “all aspects of the student finance system under review”, and Martin Lewis’s verdict on it as “a very disappointing response that does little to help the millions of students already struggling”. He closed by commending the campaign group Rethink Repayment and its founder Ollie Gardner.
Who Presented the Bill
Twelve Members from four parties are named in the order presenting the Bill. Tom Gordon is the sole sponsor on the parliamentary Bills register; the others are the supporters recorded in the Official Report.
| Member | Party | Constituency |
|---|---|---|
| Tom Gordon | Liberal Democrat | Harrogate and Knaresborough |
| Vikki Slade | Liberal Democrat | Mid Dorset and North Poole |
| Liz Jarvis | Liberal Democrat | Eastleigh |
| Ann Davies | Plaid Cymru | Caerfyrddin |
| Dr Danny Chambers | Liberal Democrat | Winchester |
| Siân Berry | Green Party | Brighton Pavilion |
| Cat Eccles | Labour | Stourbridge |
| Cat Smith | Labour | Lancaster and Wyre |
| Christine Jardine | Liberal Democrat | Edinburgh West |
| Layla Moran | Liberal Democrat | Oxford West and Abingdon |
| Ruth Cadbury | Labour | Brentford and Isleworth |
| Alex Sobel | Labour (Co-op) | Leeds Central and Headingley |
Four parties, and four Labour backbenchers among them, is a genuinely cross-party list. It is also worth keeping in proportion: supporting a Ten-Minute Rule Bill costs a Member nothing and commits no front bench to anything.
How This Fits the Treasury Committee Row
The timing was not an accident. Earlier that same afternoon, Dame Meg Hillier, Chair of the Treasury Committee, made a statement to the Commons on the Government’s response to her committee’s student loans report. Gordon rose roughly half an hour later and opened by paying tribute to her committee’s work.
That sequence is the story. A select committee had already concluded, in July 2026, that the Government has a moral obligation to reverse the Plan 2 threshold freeze. The Government declined to commit. A backbencher then used the next available procedural tool to keep the question on the floor.
The report, 7 July 2026
The Treasury Committee’s mis-selling findings and its call to reverse the freeze
The Government’s response
What ministers accepted, what they rejected, and what it means for Plan 2
Read alongside the earlier clash between Martin Lewis and the then Chancellor over the same freeze, covered in our piece on the Plan 2 threshold row, the pattern is consistent: sustained external pressure, no change to the underlying rules. Until a Budget moves the threshold, nothing on your payslip moves either.
Sources
- UK Parliament, Student Finance (Review) Bill, Bill 4300, sponsor Tom Gordon, stages and long title. bills.parliament.uk
- Hansard, Student Finance (Review), House of Commons, 15 September 2026, for the motion, the speech and the order presenting the Bill. hansard.parliament.uk
- Hansard, Student Loans statement by Dame Meg Hillier, House of Commons, 15 September 2026. hansard.parliament.uk
- UK Parliament, Private Members’ Bills, for the definition and standing of Ten-Minute Rule Bills. parliament.uk
- UK Parliament Members service, for the party and constituency of each Member named as presenting the Bill. members.parliament.uk
- Harrogate News, “Tom Gordon MP Introduces Parliamentary Bill to Overhaul Student Loans”, 15 September 2026. harrogate-news.co.uk
- Times Higher Education, “Ministers unlikely to bow to Plan 2 loan reform pressure, experts say”. timeshighereducation.com
- GOV.UK, repaying your student loan, for the thresholds, rate and write-off rules quoted throughout. gov.uk
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Tom Gordon’s Bill change my student loan repayments?▼
No. The Student Finance (Review) Bill would require a review of student finance in England. It would not alter a threshold, a rate, an interest charge or a write-off period, and it has not become law in any case. Your Plan 2 threshold remains £29,385 for 2026-27 and your repayment rate remains 9% of everything you earn above it.
What is a Ten-Minute Rule Bill?▼
It is a type of Private Members’ Bill. An MP gets about ten minutes after Question Time on a Tuesday or Wednesday to ask the House for leave to bring in a bill, and another Member may speak against. UK Parliament describes such bills as “often an opportunity for Members to voice an opinion on a subject or aspect of existing legislation, rather than a serious attempt to get a bill passed”. They very rarely become law, because they sit behind ballot bills in the queue for the limited Private Members’ Bill time available.
When is the second reading, and will the Bill be debated then?▼
The Bill was read the first time on 15 September 2026 and listed for a second reading on Friday 15 January 2027. That is the date it is listed for rather than a guaranteed debate. On a Private Members’ Bill Friday the House works through the order paper in sequence, and bills further down the list are frequently not reached at all.
Is this a Treasury review or a Department for Education review?▼
The Bill’s long title places the duty on the Secretary of State, and student finance in England is a Department for Education responsibility. Some coverage has described it as forcing a Treasury or Chancellor review, which is loose. The Chancellor matters because the threshold freeze was a Budget decision and any reversal would have to be funded, but the review duty in this Bill would fall on the Education Secretary.
Does the Bill cover Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?▼
No. The long title limits the review to student finance in England. Student finance is devolved, so Plan 4 borrowers in Scotland and Plan 1 borrowers in Northern Ireland fall outside it, and so do Welsh Plan 2 borrowers even though Wales continues to issue Plan 2 loans.
Could the Bill lead to my loan being written off or refunded?▼
Nothing in the Bill provides for write-offs, refunds or compensation. It requires a review to consider the terms and conditions that applied when loans were issued, which is a look backwards at what borrowers were told, not a redress scheme. Treat any firm offering to reclaim student loan repayments on the strength of this Bill with considerable caution.
Who is Tom Gordon?▼
Tom Gordon is the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Harrogate and Knaresborough. He declared an interest when moving the motion, telling the House that he holds both a Plan 2 loan and a postgraduate loan, with a combined balance of more than £65,000, and that 15p of every extra pound he earns goes on repayments on top of tax.
Related Resources
Plan 2 Explained
Thresholds, interest and write-off rules for Plan 2 borrowers
Plan 2 Threshold Freeze Guide
The mechanics of the April 2027 to April 2030 freeze and what it costs you
Monthly Repayment Calculator
What comes off your payslip under the rules in force today
Repayment Thresholds
Every plan’s threshold for 2026-27, annual, monthly and weekly
Student Loan Calculator UK Editorial Team
Editorial Team
This page is maintained by the Student Loan Calculator UK editorial team, checked against GOV.UK and Student Loans Company guidance. Read more about our editorial approach.