It would leave him massively worse off than if he'd been putting those savings into an ISA.

One of my mates has spent the last few years stuffing all of his savings into overpaying his student loan. How is someone like that going to feel if you cancel everyone's student debt and hit him with a grad tax after spending all that time living with his parents to try and clear his balance.

This wouldn't work as the student loan funding system you are on is path dependent. You can't switch from a loan system to a graduate tax without having countless sob stories from people who feel pissed, as they took out bank loans to repay their plan 2 loan (due to idiotic social media advice).

www.newscientist.com/article/dn13...

thoughts, but his musical faculties were still in tact. You can very much hear a difference in his style towards the end of his life

Towards the end of his life, Ravel likely had frontotemporal dementia and he would struggle to express his thoughts verbally or musically. His music becomes far more repetitive, e.g Bolero. In his later period, he devoted much more time to orchestration as he struggled to express his own creative ..

Wales is now full PR

Grenfell caused a bunch of insurers to exit the market for anything with cladding or other fire safety issues due to the perceived risk, and the remaining ones will typically give eye watering quotes. I'm not sure about what's been driving price rises in the rest of the market

Ever escalating ground rents tend to end up capitalised in lower selling prices, so I'm not so sure about this.

Good

The final step is to brief your plan to a journalist a week before the wedding just to let them know how smart you are.

It's also not one that it makes sense to avoid regardless of family background, at least under the current plan, since the interest rate for plan 5 is significantly below the interest rate on inflation linked gilts.

Yeah, people are gonna be paying those off for a long time, but the interest rate is still sufficiently low that if you didn't need to take out a loan, you could take one out anyways and invest the money back into index linked gilts paying an interest rate 2% higher.

It's mostly collected by HMRC using the existing income tax/NI infrastructure, which needs to exist regardless.

Moreover, if interest rates fall, you can just crystallise any gains on your gilt position (capital gains tax free) and pay of the student loan with a tidy profit whilst if interest rates rise you can just hold till maturity.

I'd agree that in some circumstances, in particular, people doing medical degrees whose future income is highly predictable, pre-paying under plan 2 might have made sense, especially as interest rates were lower in the mid/late 2010s and early 2020s. But this isn't true for anyone under plan 5.

Especially when index linked gilts of a similar duration yield RPI + 2%, pre-paying is literally burning money.

20-30 year index linked gilts are currently paying an interest rate of RPI +2%. Plan 5, the current plan, student loan interest rates are at RPI + 0%. So as of today, any kid who pays upfront is literally burning money just to avoid having a loan that they likely won't need to repay in full anyway.

I'd assume the rest would come from a combination of borrowing against future fare revenue and/or future increases in business rates (due to land value uplift from the project).