I weld y dudalen hon yn Gymraeg, cliciwch yma.
Wales has missed out on £1.9 billion of public spending on higher education over thirteen years because of the way the Treasury counts student loans, according to new research published today by the higher education policy analysts Wonkhe.
The analysis uses the Office for National Statistics figures that record, for each UK nation, the portion of student lending that is never expected to be repaid – spending that has counted as public expenditure since a 2019 accounting change, and which is recorded as government spending in the year each loan is issued.
Between 2012–13 and 2024–25, the ONS recorded £82.9 billion of that spending for England and £2.7 billion for Wales. Had England's spending per head been matched in Wales, the figure would have been £4.6 billion – a difference of £1.9 billion, meaning the spending recorded for Wales ran at around 59 per cent of the English rate.
Per resident, the UK government's counted spending on student loan write-offs over the period comes to £1,437 in England and £857 in Wales. In 2024–25 alone, the gap was £269 million – set against a year in which Cardiff University proposed cutting around 400 academic posts.
The research also documents how exposed Wales now is to decisions taken in Westminster about England. A ministerial briefing to the Senedd's children, young people and education committee in March 2026 disclosed that the Welsh write-off bill for 2025–26 may rise to around £367 million, driven by a new UK-wide repayments model and by the fact that Wales still runs the Plan 2 scheme England abandoned in 2023. Because Treasury cover is capped at a Barnett share of England's forecast costs, £7.7 million falls on the Welsh budget, and ministers warned that even modest further growth in lending or divergence from English repayment policy is likely to prove unsustainable.
Jennifer Taylor, President of NUS Cymru, said:
"Wales is running a student finance system it cannot change and cannot afford, because the rules are written for England and the bill lands here. We use grants to keep maintenance support within reach of poorer students, and the funding system prices that choice at zero. We kept the repayment terms England walked away from, and Wales gets the bill for the difference.
"Students are being told there is no money – that maintenance support has to drift further below the wage floor it was built on, that fees must rise, that courses and jobs have to go. Meanwhile £1.9 billion of counted public spending on higher education never made it to Wales, and no one in government has ever been asked to review why.
"The new Plaid Cymru government review of the future of higher education is the moment to put this right. It must examine the funding machinery itself, on the record, before it recommends a single fee rise. The Welsh Government should surely be demanding from the Treasury what Scotland was given for welfare in 2016: a negotiated settlement that funds the choice we make, whether that is loans, grants or lower fees, instead of only ever funding debt."
