Ollie Gardner on Why You Need to Earn £66,000 to Stop Your Student Loan Growing

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[00:00] Sammie: Welcome back to the Money Gains podcast. We have Ollie Gardner in today from Rethink Repayment, and we’re going to be discussing student loans. Ollie, how are you doing, man?

[00:09] Ollie: Well, good thanks. Thanks for having me.

[00:10] Sammie: Yeah, I mate, I’ve just fell in love with your message at the moment. And I want to jump straight in because I think it’s a massively important topic. It’s a hot topic right now. A lot of people are talking about this. What is the problem with student loans in 2026?

[00:26] Ollie: Well, there are lots of problems. I think there’s a real sense of unfairness and anger from graduates who feel that these loans are having a massive impact on their finances and they’re not necessarily meeting the terms that they signed up to when they took these loans out. And I think people are starting to feel as they’re getting a bit older and earning a bit more and going into their 30s and starting to think about trying to buy houses or start families, that they’re finding that really difficult because of these student loans and the terms that we think are quite unfair.

[00:55] Sammie: How do they work at the moment? So, like when do you start like paying them, for example?

[00:59] Ollie: Yeah. So if we focus on plan two loans, which are the loans that you took out if you went to uni between 2012 and 2023, then you start repaying them the April after you graduate and you pay back 9% of all of your income over the repayment threshold, which is at the moment £28,470. Wow. Yeah, 9%’s a lot.

[01:19] Sammie: 9% is a lot.

[01:20] Ollie: Yeah.

[01:21] Sammie: Because you like we’re already struggling.

[01:23] Ollie: Yeah.

[01:23] Sammie: And we’re then hit with this 9% almost the day of that we uh start earning above that, right? Which in today’s day and age is most jobs out of university are in and around that mark.

[01:34] Ollie: Yeah, and 9% is obviously a significant chunk, particularly when people are at the stage of life where they want to be, you know, saving to buy a house or starting families, like that money for a lot of people would make a big difference. And I think people are delaying those decisions or not even able to, you know, buy houses or start families because partly because of that, you know, extra income that they’re losing.

[01:54] Sammie: We’re gonna get into a lot of that, but I think the main contentious issue, which I’m seeing a lot of people say, is that we were missold student loans, that we weren’t explaining it properly. Um, you know, I remember very vividly that conversation when I first started chatting with you. I was like harping back to old memories, and I was like, I remember sitting there in that room, and I do actually remember them saying that it was like more of an investment into your future. Yeah. It wasn’t necessarily fully explained about the interest that we could potentially pay on that loan or how long it could potentially pay it back.

[02:27] Ollie: Yeah. I think there are two aspects. There’s the really clear aspect, which is that the loan terms that were set out when people took out these plan two loans have been reneged on. They have been retrospectively changed. So by freezing the plan two thresholds, which they’ve done a couple of times and they’re going to do again from 2027 to 2030, that is not what people signed up to and not what people agreed to. So when Martin Lewis is saying that it’s a contract and the government has basically breached that contract, that’s what he’s talking about. Because no bank would be allowed to, you know, retrospectively change the terms of your mortgage after you’ve after you’ve signed up to it. But because it’s the government and it’s legislated by parliament, they are allowed to do that. So that’s definitely really clear. And I think lots of people are incredibly angry about that, and rightly so, because you can’t just keep changing these terms because it’s not done in good faith. But the second part, which is about misselling, is probably more for a lawyer to decide, and that’s something that I think people are looking into. Um, but that’s the idea that when we were told about these loans in school, you know, lots of people were told that it wouldn’t cost you more than a phone contract each month. We had someone recently tell us that they were told at a uni talk on a unicampus that you’d be paying more on your beer bill each month than your student loan repayments, which obviously for lots of people is ridiculous. So this whole idea that it wouldn’t really be a significant amount of money, but now people are seeing hundreds of pounds a month in some cases taken from their from their pay. So it’s yeah, it does feel like people weren’t weren’t told the full picture. And that’s also ignoring the fact that they were 17, right? And so technically a child, like, should someone be taking out a loan of that magnitude that’s going to impact their finances for the rest of their life when they’re not even 18.

[04:09] Sammie: Yeah, potentially as well. And then you’re also relying on the parents to then understand the terms of that loan for them when perhaps that’s not necessarily in their, you know, ballpark themselves, because as we know, financial education wasn’t taught in schools. Yeah. So even understanding what the terms of an loan even mean for a lot of people at that age, or even their parents, they struggle with that.

[04:31] Ollie: Yeah, 100%. And I think the way that I experienced it was that my school effectively said, you know, you’re going to university, not quite in those terms, but like they push you to, and there aren’t there weren’t really that many alternatives offered to us. Um, and I my I wasn’t in a position where my parents could afford to pay for my tuition fees. Therefore, I sort of had to take out a student loan, right? I was told that I needed to go to university in order to get a good job, but I couldn’t pay to go up front, so I needed the loan. So it wasn’t even like the young people were left with much position other than to take it as well.

[05:07] Sammie: Yeah, yeah, of course.

[05:08] Ollie: Yeah. I think the schools like they obviously want students to go to good universities because they can, you know, say that we got X number of people into these unis.

[05:17] Sammie: Selling point to the parents, I suppose, when they come, is that you know 54% of the kids went off to X, Y, and Z type universities.

[05:24] Ollie: But I think obviously we would be really careful not to blame the schools specifically because whilst they might have contributed to people feeling like they needed to go, it’s also a massive societal thing where lots of employers require people to have degrees nowadays, and therefore, if you want to work in certain industries in the lots of professional industries, then you’re told you need a degree. So that’s part of the reason why schools probably encourage people to go.

[05:49] Sammie: It’s wild when you look at the data because the it it depends on where you look and the data set that you’re looking at and when it’s from, but it’s roughly between 60 to 70 percent of people don’t even ever use the uni degree that they took. Yeah. Because let’s face it, man, when you’re 17, like I didn’t know what I really wanted to do. Like back then, I was like, I’m gonna be a music producer, yeah, yeah, and then gonna go out to university and have fun and do all of these things. Like, unless you’ve got a really clear idea of your pathway or your parents are influencing your pathway at that point too, like you’re gonna become a doctor or a lawyer, yeah. Um, then you’re kind of like in this catch-22 situation, you’re like letting down your parents if you didn’t do it, but you’re also like school’s telling you it’s the good idea, there’s not really another pathway for you. Starting a business is almost impossible for like a lot of kids, especially when we were that age as well, without like real internet knowledge. Yeah. Um, and it just seems like it was a sort of real really the only way out or the only way to carry on at that point. Because you you didn’t want to go work in a bar at that point. You might have done a gap year and gone and done a bit of travelling, but when you came back, it was like, Are you gonna go now?

[06:57] Ollie: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

[06:59] Sammie: It’s so strange because you know, I feel like for my own sister as well, right? She’s on plan two and she worked in the UK for about three, four years after um university. He started paying some of it back, and she worked out that her interest had just been increasing and just gone, now I’m going to Australia, like I’m not coming back. Yeah. And I just wondered what you felt about that because there’s the stats around people leaving now is quite staggering.

[07:27] Ollie: Yeah, I mean, I think lots of young people, particularly those that have, I guess, mobile labour, so particularly those with skills that they can take abroad. I think the UK is feeling like an increasingly sort of unwelcome place to be, you know, someone that’s ambitious and wants to get a good job and earn a decent amount of money because you know you’re hit with these quite high marginal tax rates, and it’s also increasingly difficult to, you know, buy a house. And you’ve got all issues around like childcare and how expensive that is if you want to start a family. So I think we’re seeing more people make that move. Um, where also you know the job opportunities might be more plentiful. Because I think the UK labour market’s not great at the moment either.

[08:11] Sammie: No, it’s not, you know, it’s it’s it’s been a tough time, I think, for um since Brexit, really. It’s just kind of been a very sort of difficult place, and you know, sun sea sand and sangria is calling. You know, it’s it it it’s difficult for a young person to turn that down.

[08:25] Ollie: Um I think it is it is probably worth saying though that obviously if you move abroad, there’s this common phrase that people say, Oh, you can just move abroad and then not pay back your student loan. I I don’t think it necessarily works like that. You still are liable to pay it back. Yeah. Um should you return. Should you well, yeah. I mean, I think theoretically you’re liable to pay it back regardless. It’s whether, you know, if you return, that’s when they’re getting you for him, probably.

[08:51] Sammie: Yeah, that that and that’s the killer, right? Because if she worked, carried on working even at certain salary thresholds, this grows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just doesn’t it doesn’t get smaller. But we’re gonna get onto that because I think it’s a really important topic, is and why you’re running, you know, Rethink Repayment and the campaign itself, because it’s just so insane when you start diving into those numbers. But just for someone who doesn’t understand exactly how it works in terms of what they pay back and how that percentage is worked out, because then that sets us up for the numbers, which is pretty wild.

[09:28] Ollie: So for the plan two loans, which are the ones that started in 2012 and up to 2023, interest is worked out on a sliding scale, basically depending on how much you earn.

[09:39] Sammie: Right.

[09:39] Ollie: So the lowest it can be is RPI inflation, which is currently 3.2%. But as you start earning more, the interest rate charged on your balance goes up to RPI plus 3%, which is currently 6.2%, and you reach that interest rate when you start earning about £51,000. So anyone earning above £51,000 has an interest rate of 6.2% on their loan balance. And that is obviously significantly higher than the average mortgage rate at the moment, which is sitting at around 4%. Yeah. Which seems wild, particularly given this was an educational loan.

[10:19] Sammie: Yeah. And you’re you’re told it’s, you know, there’s good debt and bad debt, and you’re told it’s a good good debt.

[10:24] Ollie: Yeah. And effectively what this means is that if you have a balance of around £50,000, then you need to be earning over £66,000 a year in order that your repayments are more than the interest added to your loan. So you have to be earning more than 66 grand for your loan balance to actually be going down. If you earn any less than that, your loan balance is rising. And because of the way compounding of interest works, it probably will just run away from you.

[10:52] Sammie: And so 66,000 just to cover interest?

[10:55] Ollie: Yeah.

[10:55] Sammie: Before you’re even bringing down the loan amount.

[10:57] Ollie: Yeah, that’s that’s the break-even amount.

[11:00] Sammie: That is absolutely wild. So that is here the top 15% of earners in the UK.

[11:06] Ollie: Yeah.

[11:07] Sammie: So 85% of the UK are never going to hit that.

[11:10] Ollie: Yeah. So for lots of people, their balances are going to be increasing, which I think is really demoralizing because, you know, it’s hanging over people. As much as people like to say, oh, think of it like a tax, I mean, I disagree of calling it a tax for a few reasons. I mean, it’s it’s sort of a high a bad hybrid between a tax and a debt. But people say, oh, the actual loan balance doesn’t matter. But if you’re logging into your student finance account and seeing that amount of money, how can that not be demoralizing? And I think that’s causing quite a lot of stress to a lot of people. Yeah. Particularly people that, you know, think that they might be able to start earning a decent wage over the course of their um lives because they will be paying back a huge amount of that interest.

[11:56] Sammie: Yeah, with that nine percent. Yeah. So it’s just like, and then that interest on the loan, that nine percent is not covering it. So you’re like, what am I paying this for?

[12:05] Ollie: Yeah, exactly. You’d like to think that you could start earning a pretty decent wage in the UK and be making a dent in your student loan so that it’s going down each year, but unless you’re earning 66 grand, that’s not the case. And Rachel Reeves said the other day that you needed to be earning a good wage for the loan balance to fall. But 60, calling like any good wage 66 grand, like you can be earning 50 grand, which is a very good wage for lots of people, and your loan balance would still be rising if you had 50 grand’s worth of debt. So that seems really, really unfair. And what that’s going to lead to is lots of people in middle earning jobs paying back significant amounts of interest over the course of their loan, because the interest is sort of running away from them in the first few years, and then later in life they’re paying that down. So they can end up paying back multiples of what they borrowed initially, which doesn’t seem fair.

[13:42] Sammie: Because like with a mortgage, you pay quite a lot of interest initially, and then that comes down and you start, you know, balancing it back out in terms of what you’re covering of the actual original loan. Yeah. Like if you were to do that, like it feels like maybe that might be a better system. But it’s absolutely nuts. So I look this up and it £15 billion was added in interest last year, and gr graduates repaid five billion.

[14:07] Ollie: Yeah. So that is growing. 10 billion pounds. Yeah. And that, because of the way interest works with compounding, those interest bars are probably only going to get bigger.

[14:17] Sammie: Yeah.

[14:17] Ollie: But I think one thing that it’s sort of important for us to remember is a lot of that interest is above inflation interest that’s added. So it’s coming from that RPI plus 3% bit. So people are, you know, I would say that actually a lot of that interest in some ways is almost like fake money.

[14:39] Sammie: Yeah.

[14:40] Ollie: In the sense that it’s an interest rate that shouldn’t be that high anyway. So when we’re talking about all of these outstanding loan balances that are going to grow and grow and grow over the next 30 years, a lot of what that balance will be will be this ridiculous extra interest that’s added. So it shouldn’t have been there in the first place, is what our campaign thinks.

[15:01] Sammie: I agree because if you look back to 2016, 50,000 people repaid their student loans in full. Last year it was 2,943. That’s a pretty big jump.

[15:16] Ollie: Big jump, isn’t it? And I I imagine that that’s a combination of the higher tuition fees that uh came into play in 2012 when they tripled from three grand a year to nine grand a year. Which is nuts in itself. Which is I mean, tripling is is absolutely absolutely wild. And then obviously the interest, the above inflation interest of the plan two loans is I imagine contributing that because you have to be, as you say, you have to be top 15% of earners in order to be paying your loan down.

[15:44] Sammie: And let’s say like you do go out and you get a very good job, uh, let’s call it a doctor, right, as an example, because like you know, in society doctors, you study for a quite a long time, right? Especially for for a medical profession. Uh and even if you’re doing that, you’re not gonna be on 66 grand plus straight away.

[16:07] Ollie: No, absolutely not.

[16:08] Sammie: Which is just like it just feels like you’ve gone to university to be this per type of person, but you end up having to just pay the government back. And I think it’s immoral.

[16:23] Ollie: Yeah, I think I think I agree. I think lots of people agree. I think that’s why our campaign has got quite a lot of traction and why we’ve seen it all over, you know, the mainstream media for the last few weeks is that I think people are rightly outraged by it. And it’s not just people with plan two loans. So my parents, I’ve got two sisters, my parents feel really angry about this because all of their children have plan two loans, and this is going to affect them all, us all, until we’re in our 50s, realistically. None of us will probably ever earn enough to fully pay off the balance. And also the people that went to university who didn’t pay this much money and are seeing younger generations burdened with this sort of extra debt hanging around their neck for pretty much all their lives, whilst also facing really difficult economic challenges in other areas, like, you know, how much it costs to buy a house and how unaffordable that is, and childcare costs if you want to have kids. Like, and then adding on this student loan repayment on top of that, I think, is making people feel like it’s almost impossible to, you know, and then you’ve got a way like weird gaps.

[17:34] Sammie: So let’s say you did get above the 66,000 pounds, but then you start earning too much. Well, then you lose your childcare allowances. So then you’ve got that like drop off of a cliff of earnings there. Yeah. And so it’s like, well, where do we even stand? Like there’s this weird new gap between that 66,000 and the hundred K of before you lose your you know, child at childcare allowances. And that’s just nuts. So we’re we’re making it really sort of it’s is it sort of underwhelms productivity in this country. Like we want to be productive, we want to be producing great people, yeah, but we can’t because they don’t want to then now go to university to do the studies because they can’t afford it.

[18:09] Ollie: 100%. I think it’s been called a tax on ambition quite a lot recently because these are people who have done everything that they’ve been told, right? You know, they’ve gone to university, they’ve worked hard, they’ve managed to potentially get a really good job, and they’re trying to, you know, invest in their futures, invest in their pension, which they’re told they need to do. They’re trying to buy a house, which they’re told is really important to accumulate wealth, they want to start a family, but all of this stuff, even though they’re doing everything right, is being made so difficult for them that I think lots of people are almost thinking, is it worth it? Is it even worth trying? And we’re hearing, we’re hearing from a lot of people whose marginal tax rates are so high that actually they’re not taking promotions or they’re not taking overtime shifts. Or as you said, maybe they’re considering moving abroad because they just don’t feel that the extra stress and effort of you know taking on a more managerial position and the extra work that that involves is worth the relatively meagre increase in their take-home pay because so much of it goes to tax and student loans.

[19:09] Sammie: So, like a basic example, right? Let’s just say you’re earning 30 grand and you take home £2,250 a month, give and take, right? Um the numbers escape me, but let’s just call it that for argument’s sake. Well then that’s £220 odd pounds that’s going towards your student loan. And I’m not saying don’t repayment pay it. But right now, when cost of living has gone through the roof, wages haven’t kept up with that um with that at all in any way, shape or form. We’ve got inflation running away from us. That £200 odd pounds would be pretty useful at some point in our life. So if we understand we took the loan out, we’ve got to pay it back at some point. Yeah, we get that bit. But it’s the where it’s running away from us. So we’re always going to have that £200 and likely increasing amounts as we grow in earnings and grow up grow with age. Like, what’s the solution then? Like, what’s what are you campaigning for right now where it would bring this under control?

[20:05] Ollie: Yeah. So what our campaign is proposing is that, well, it’s three things really. Firstly, we think that the plan two threshold needs to be reinstated to what it would have been had the government kept its promise about how it would rise when they announced how the loan worked. So that would mean reversing the freezes and then reinstating it, the um annual indexation to be with average earnings. Because at the moment, what they’ve done is they’ve switched it to rise with RPI inflation, which is normally lower than average earnings. Secondly, we think that all interest on student loans should be set at CPI inflation. So there shouldn’t be above inflation interest rates. And that removes that weird link where as you earn more, your interest rate increases, which obviously happens on no other loan. No. Um, but also helps to address some things like the motherhood penalty with student loans, where if you are normally a mother, but can be obviously any parent that takes time out to look after their children, interest is still accruing, but particularly that in but above inflation interest that they might be paying later on in their career means that they end up paying back more than someone in the same profession that didn’t take time out of the workforce.

[21:21] Sammie: Yeah. Which we’ve got, you know, basically a declining birth rate in this country. It’s harder to have kids. It’s it’s it’s more it’s harder than ever. Like a child over the course of its lifetime costs like 250 grand and increasing on year. Yeah. So then we’re then making it harder on the mother to even have the child because she’s then got a student loan that’s grown by the time she got back, that’s nuts.

[21:45] Ollie: Yeah.

[21:45] Sammie: And we could freeze that like a maternity and essentially during that period.

[21:49] Ollie: So we’re saying if we cap student loans at interest at CPI inflation, no one will pay back more in real terms over the course of their um lifetime. So even if it takes people back a bit longer to pay it back because of the way inflation works, because your wages are rising, you shouldn’t pay back more in real terms than what you’ve borrowed. And then I think the third policy that we think is really important is that the repayment rate, probably on something like earnings below the higher rate of income tax threshold. Yeah, 50,000. Yeah, earnings below that then should be subject to a student loan repayment rate of 5% rather than 9%, because that’s what we’re talking about with the cost of living and people really struggling to afford to do these things that we need a productive economy to do. We need people to have children. We sort of want people to buy houses and we want people to save for their retirement and lowering that repayment rate for that chunk of.

[23:52] Sammie: Income would allow people to do that more, and hopefully that would make the UK economy better in the long run, which obviously I don’t want to get into politics too much, but obviously Labour, we’ve seen the polls that you know them not being the most favourable first 18, 24 months uh in power. Um seems like a really easy win.

[24:13] Ollie: I think that it would be a really good thing to show that you know care about the population and the cost of living, right? This is a real like mandate. This is a cost of living policy, a lot of what we’re talking about, which will help people in the here and now. Um so I would like to think that um it’s something that they’re really strongly considering. I know that I think this is something that they are considering. I know behind closed doors I think they’re talking about this. You’ll have seen that Rachel Reeves and Bridget Phillipson recently have been speaking about student loans.

[24:45] Sammie: Well, they’re getting questions about it now.

[24:46] Ollie: Yeah, which is a start. Which is great because it’s also something weirdly that no one’s talked about. Like when I started this campaign, I was so surprised that it wasn’t more of an issue.

[24:57] Sammie: Well, it flew under the radar in the budget because of the income tax like freeze. So that was the big story. It was like fiscal drag. Yeah. It was like a secondary wave of fiscal drag on student loans.

[25:07] Ollie: Yeah, exactly. So I don’t know if you remember, but they the OBR actually leaked the budget thing before. And I remember reading through that and I control F student loans, and we weren’t expecting anything about student loans in there. And then I saw the freezes of the both the repayment threshold and the interest rate thresholds, and I was like, this is not good. This is really bad for graduates, and this is bad for young people. And I think it’s sort of symptomatic of young people being taken for granted in reality. And it’s not only, you know, are they getting fiscally dragged into higher income tax, but they’re also getting fiscally dragged into more student loan repayments, and it’s hitting them with this sort of like double stealth tax, which is not something that they can afford at that stage of their lives.

[25:58] Sammie: Well, it’s like a balancing act of like what’s fair and what’s not. And it just feels like it’s completely outweighed because, for example, like the kids with the bank of mum and dad, like you mentioned, you know, your your parents you know didn’t have the money to put through tuition, neither did mine. Yeah, like it’s pretty normal, right? Yeah. It’s a lot of money.

[26:14] Ollie: Most people have to take out student loans, right?

[26:16] Sammie: Exactly. Um, but those who didn’t now have this kind of free reign of that extra money going back into them, yeah. And that gap of wealth starts being even more divided.

[26:27] Ollie: So the people helping run our campaign, we ran a very quick, crude model. But let’s say someone has a starting salary of 40 grand, which is obviously quite a good starting salary, but not beyond the realms of possibility.

[26:38] Sammie: Above the median.

[26:39] Ollie: Yeah. If that person, if we compare them to someone who starts on exactly the same salary but who didn’t have a student loan, and they reinvest everything that they save compared to the person with the student loan because they’re not making those repayments, if they reinvest that into, you know, stocks and shares ISA with a roughly six, seven percent rate of return, by the end of the 30-year loan, they’ll have about 130 grand more in savings than the person with the student loan. And that’s just from saving that chunk of repayment each month. So it’s gonna massively widen inequality because I mean, I also I’ve got nothing against people whose parents that paid for their tuition fees. Like I would have to take it. Yeah, exactly. But it’s only gonna widen that gap, particularly if those people are coming from backgrounds potentially with more family wealth anyway, and then they’ve got this additional um chunk of money that they they uh adding to their take-home pay, then yeah, that inequality is presumably only gonna grow.

[27:44] Sammie: Totally. Like the kid that’s done amazing to get out of, say, a council estate in somewhere and gone off and got a master’s and got a really great job and done really well, or just got a good job and done the thing and carried on and gone through university. You know, I’m I’m you know, playing a divide here, but just sort of accentuate the actual thing here. They’re in trouble for the rest of their life now with this tax or or whatever you want to call it. And the kid who has you know got a 40 grand job but their parents pay for them is absolutely cushy.

[28:15] Ollie: Yeah. Well, not absolutely custody. Not absolutely cushy, but you understand what the difference is. I think you also make a really good point that another really unfair aspect of this system is that if you’re from a lower income household, you had to borrow more to go to university. Because maintenance grants on the whole were scrapped, there’s an implicit parental subsidy really in the university system. So if your parents earn a certain amount, they’re expected to effectively top up your maintenance loan. But if you’re from a low-income household and you can’t get that top up, then you borrow more. But that then means that you end up leaving university with a much bigger loan balance than someone who did the same degree who was from a wealthier family, even if they still have a student loan. And that means that when you’re getting into, let’s say, being a doctor, that person from a lower income background’s loan will be even bigger, which means that they’ve got even less chance of paying it off over the course of their life and might end up paying back, you know, far more than someone else who was able to clear it earlier.

[29:19] Sammie: So let’s play devil’s advocate here because I think some people have different viewpoints on this and just to play the other side, right? Obviously, that’s a lot of income for the government right now. The government are in debt and growing. Um, we’re seeing, you know, the UK national debt levels increase. If they were to say, do what you suggested, which is, you know, cap it at these levels, how are they going to pay for that?

[29:49] Ollie: Well, I mean, I think our core argument is that the long-term cost of not giving young people the ability to invest in their futures, whether that be starting families or saving in their pensions or buying houses, the long-term cost of that to the economy will be massive. And also a lot of what we talk about in terms of the write-offs that the government will need to do further down the line, a lot of what that is in terms of plan two loans is that above inflation interest that’s added. Yeah. So actually, if that’s being written off, well, we would argue that that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. What I think our campaign is trying to do is come at it from quite a pragmatic sort of stance and say, look, we’re not asking for you to wipe them off. We appreciate that people went to university and knew that they would have to pay back some of the cost of their education. Yeah. But we think that the negative impact this is having on young people can’t continue. And it’s really unfair. The government would ultimately have to decide where that money comes from. We don’t think it’s fair that graduates can end up paying back more than they borrowed for their education in real terms just to cover, you know, the write-offs of these student loans. Because then what you get is you get someone who is a graduate but didn’t take out a loan because their parents could pay for it. They’re not paying any of this interest. So it’s not a fair system. And I think also there are lots of indirect benefits of an individual going to university for the economy. So if you’re going to be earning more, then you’ll probably be well, you will be paying more income tax, right? So the government, if they want to encourage people to be going into these sort of professional jobs, these knowledge-based jobs, and they want people to have a degree, I think there needs to be some implicit subsidy from the state. And what happened originally when this sort of student loan system was introduced, plan two, was there was this idea of a mixed funding model where effectively the cost of you know sending someone to university would be split 50-50 roughly between the the government and the individual, whereas before it was more on the government. But now what we’ve seen is we’ve seen that more and more placed on the individual. So actually it got to a point where the 2022-23 cohort of students, the government’s actually going to make a profit on their student loans, which is wild.

[32:29] Sammie: Some people say it’s not a real debt. Yeah. And they say, you know, you only pay it when you earn, and you know, it doesn’t affect your credit score, and you know, it’s essentially not a real debt. Like, stop complaining. Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of this and I just can’t get my head round it. But what would you say to that?

[32:47] Ollie: Yeah. So I think one of the common things I hear as well is that this gets wiped off after 30 years. What are you complaining about? But what that ignores is the fact that because of the above inflation interest that we keep talking about, it’s possible that someone could pay back their initial amount borrowed and a reasonable amount of interest, but end up having to keep paying for another, you know, 10 years until the loan is wiped because the interest rate is so high. What this is effectively doing is almost making it impossible for anyone to clear their loan had it had a reasonable level of interest. So just the argument that, you know, it gets wiped off, therefore, why are you complaining? Completely ignores the fact that before it gets wiped off, people can pay back multiple times of what they’ve borrowed. So that would be the first thing I say. I think this argument that it doesn’t affect your credit score, people were told that it wouldn’t affect your mortgage, your ability to get a mortgage. So whilst it might not directly affect your credit score, it does affect your mortgage affordability because a mortgage broker will look at your take-home pay on your pay slip, not your gross pay, your take-home pay. And obviously, your student loan will have come off your gross pay, and therefore you won’t be able to get as big a mortgage. So this idea that it won’t affect your ability to get a mortgage is just wrong. And we’ve heard from lots of people who are told by their mortgage broker that I, you know, I need to know your student loan repayments in order to calculate your mortgage. Um, and I just think this idea of these loans increasing in size for so many people when they’re making consistent repayments and often quite significant repayments is really demoralizing and is really unfair. And the idea that, you know, your interest rate can increase as you start earning more, no other loan has that. So just to say, you know, this is an amazing loan, what are you complaining about? I don’t think that argument really holds water.

[34:45] Sammie: Yeah, and you know, there’s some people as well I’ve seen say, you know, that why should the plumber subsidise the extra amount that the government will have to find somewhere for that? And I just really struggle with that because I’m like, well, no, if you’d have just stuck to what you said originally, we wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. Yeah. And so, like, this is why your campaign exists. And yeah.

[35:10] Ollie: I think I think on that as well, there are lots of things that we pay income tax for that we don’t necessarily directly benefit from. So I don’t have children, but my income tax goes towards paying for primary schools. Yeah. That doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t pay a certain chunk of income tax.

[35:30] Sammie: I very for a better society.

[35:32] Ollie: Yeah, I very rarely use the NHS. I’m fortunate that I haven’t needed to that much in my lifetime. But that shouldn’t preclude me from paying the income tax that’s going to pay for the NHS. And Rachel Reeves the other day, one of the arguments that she was making defending the plan two system was that we needed to fund the NHS more. But it’s ludicrous to think that it should just be graduates who are doing that, right? It’s it’s bizarre.

[36:01] Sammie: It is bizarre. It is bizarre. It just seems like, as I said, it’s a quick win. And it just it it it it just installs like so much more money going background into the economy. Guess what? If you spend more money, it’s got VAT, it’s got income tax because that business can potentially hire more people, or because their profits are higher because the person spent more money with them and that uh hospitality industry, people can get out more, do more things, entertainment, all of this. Just it’s systemic. It goes right across. And it’s harder to see or put a figure on it, but it’s so obvious that if you give someone a bit of extra cash, what will they do? Well, they’re going to expend it in enjoyment in their lives or on a house or something.

[36:42] Ollie: Particularly for young people who are trying to save for these really significant milestones in their life, like that money is going to be put to good use. And I think we mentioned it earlier. But if young people aren’t able to save for these milestones, what impact is that gonna have in the long run? If people aren’t putting as much money as they would want to into their pension, well, I don’t think the state pension’s gonna exist in much form when we retire. So if people don’t have the private pension provision, what’s that gonna look like for the UK economy, right? So I think there’s a real short-termism as well. And I think you’re absolutely right, it was seen as a quick win. The economist called um the freeze the politics of least resistance. I think the government genuinely just thought that it would fly under the radar and people wouldn’t get angry about it. But I think what we’re seeing from our campaign is that this is the straw that’s broken the camel’s back. Yeah. And people are now thinking, right, this is really now taking the mick. Like the situation was already bad, and now you’re hitting us with this double stealth tax with the freezing the repayment thresholds.

[37:47] Sammie: Well, uh the the engineer who’s out in the studio right here, I explained you were coming in and he was the first year of plan two, and he was he followed you, yeah. It’s an absolute joke. Like people are really, really starting to really take notice, as they should. Um, and uh, you know, I think it is it’s massively important. But if we did then decide to sort of look at an example, so we’ve got, let’s say, for example, the doctor.

[38:13] Ollie: Yeah.

[38:14] Sammie: Um, I know you’ve run some figures on this.

[38:16] Ollie: Yeah. So we ran some figures on a doctor who started. This is a real person, by the way. It’s the friend of one person helping run the campaign. So they went to uni in 2012, so the first year of fees, and in their training to be a doctor, they had a loan balance of £61,000, roughly. So they borrowed £61,000 initially. It’s now 2026. Their loan balance is £93,500.

[38:45] Sammie: Whoa.

[38:46] Ollie: Yeah.

[38:47] Sammie: So it’s grown despite them paying it off for what’s that, 14 years?

[38:51] Ollie: Well, I mean, as soon as they started earning, so they won’t have been earning whilst they’re training. Oh, of course. But remember that whilst people are at university, they were charged RPI plus 3%. So whilst they were studying and literally couldn’t be earning an income, really, a proper income, it’s growing. It’s not just growing, but it’s growing by the maximum interest rate whilst people are in education. I mean, that is absolutely ludicrous, in my opinion, that that was allowed to happen. But that doctor, so they started with a 61 grand balance from just what they borrowed. Their balance in 2026 is now 93 grand, which has meant that 46.5 grand of interest has been added. And obviously, their balance hasn’t increased by 46,000 pounds because they’ve been making repayments as well. But 46,000 pounds of interest was added to that doctor’s loan. Okay. Of that interest, over 20,000 pounds of it was above inflation interest. So that interest rate that is above RPI. Over £20,000 of above inflation interest was added to that doctor’s loan. And you think about a doctor, we need doctors.

[40:08] Sammie: Yeah.

[40:09] Ollie: In the UK, in the current system, they have to have a degree.

[40:12] Sammie: Yeah.

[40:12] Ollie: And what does that say about it?

[40:15] Sammie: You have an open heart surgery from someone that hasn’t started.

[40:18] Ollie: Studied it, yeah, exactly. And I think it just goes to show that people in these, you know, pretty well-paying jobs are going to end up paying back huge amounts of money over the course of the 30 years, particularly for these plan two loans due to the above inflation interest. And that’s why we think that interest needs to be capped at CPI. We ran another model.

[40:40] Sammie: So this is a rough estimate, a bit of a bit of a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

[40:45] Ollie: We’ve got a group of economists, uh, so professional sort of economists who all reached out to help with the campaign. Oh, good. And yeah, we have some we have some fun modelling some of this stuff, which makes me sound like a loser. But um so this doctor, right? This is a rough estimate. So you can’t hold me 100% to these exact figures, but this is what we would expect to happen. That across their lifetime, they’re gonna make about 150 grand’s worth of repayments. So more than double. More than double what they borrowed. Okay. A total of 300 grand of interest is probably going to be added to their loan over the course of its term. What? Whoa, okay. Because if you think about the compounding of interest and how it works, as your balance grows and you’ve got a high interest rate, after certain years, not only are you paying interest on the principal, but you’re paying interest on the interest, and you know, that’s sort of just gonna go exponential. And at the end of that loan period, we would expect around £200,000 of the loan balance to be wiped. Okay. Okay. So this is for a paediatric surgeon, right, who’s a relatively well-paying job, but at the end of the loan, a still a massive amount is getting wiped. And now lots of people would say, well, you should be really happy because you’re not sort of paying all of that back. A balance is getting wiped. But the reason that so much is getting wiped is because the interest added is astronomical. Yeah. And it should be feasible for a doctor to pay back their loan over the course of the 30 years, right? The principle that it borrowed and you know, a reasonable interest rate. But this just goes to show how messed up the system is, effectively.

[42:33] Sammie: You look up at the doctor and you go, Well done, you know, must have worked really, really hard to get to that point, well paid, as they should be at that point, because they’re looking after people, but they’re in this position.

[42:44] Ollie: Yeah.

[42:44] Sammie: It’s just absolutely mind-blowing. And then you know what what about everyone else too? Yeah, yeah. Because that’s happening to everyone.

[42:51] Ollie: Yeah.

[42:52] Sammie: That is mental.

[42:53] Ollie: It is a really, really stark example that shows just quite how bad it could be for people or will be for people at the current rate.

[43:01] Sammie: And then what if you then put that down and the cost difference like is this a house in cash?

[43:08] Ollie: Yeah.

[43:09] Sammie: Like it in a lot of areas of the country, obviously not in London, no, you all know that. But you know, up north or so in in rural areas, like it’s a full-blown house in cash.

[43:20] Ollie: This is a lot of money, and people will be paying back a lot of extra interest, particularly those people in middle to sort of middle high-earning jobs, they’re gonna be really badly hit.

[43:31] Sammie: My god, that’s actually it’s like it’s got me there.

[43:34] Ollie: Yeah, yeah.

[43:35] Sammie: You know, and I I just think those those those people must be so annoyed.

[43:41] Ollie: I think, yeah, that’s why uh our campaign has got quite a lot more traction because I think lots of people have been thinking this for a while, and maybe we just haven’t, you know, got together and made our voices heard, but hopefully that’s what we’re doing. And I think that, you know, our campaign is not arguing for all student debt to be wiped, right? Some people think that that should happen. Well, I was just gonna ask you that.

[44:04] Sammie: Yeah, I was just gonna say to you like that obviously there are a lot of countries which run with free, you know, post high school or or or secondary school education, like was that actually a better solution and than this?

[44:19] Ollie: Yeah, I mean, well, personally, I think that you know, that is preferable to the system we we’ve got in the UK. Obviously, we don’t live in a world in which there is, you know, infinite pots of money. These are political choices ultimately. So in those countries where university is free or very, very cheap, there have been political choices that have been made to make it cheaper. I mean, I don’t want to wade too much into this argument, but for example, if you’re a Scottish student, it’s far cheaper for you to go to university in Scotland than it is to go to university in England. So these are all political choices. I think what we’re saying is that no one should be paying back vastly more than what they borrowed because of this ridiculous interest rate.

[45:05] Sammie: Yeah. And would a fixed rate not just like that’s your rate that’s agreed with you before you go to university, at least so it’s just like stays the same.

[45:17] Ollie: A fixed interest rate.

[45:18] Sammie: Yeah.

[45:19] Ollie: The problem you get in there is when you’re thinking about it from a very nerdy economics angle, is that if inflation ends up going higher than that rate, then the real value of the debt will fall, which might obviously in the go is not necessarily in the government’s interests. Okay. So we think that people shouldn’t pay back more than what their loan balance is currently in real terms. Yeah.

[45:47] Sammie: So if we said like a hundred you got a hundred pounds, if we work out what happens then it’s Like if the increase increases by 7% is £107, for example. Like, is that a way of looking at this?

[46:00] Ollie: Yeah, so I mean, I think so. When we say you’re not going to pay back more than your loan balance now is currently in real terms, that means that obviously as your wages increase in the future due to inflation and your loan balance increases, those should sort of rise at a roughly similar rate. Whereas what we’ve got at the moment with above inflation interest rates for some people is, you know, their wages are rising if they are rising, but their interest is rising at an even faster rate. So that’s why it’s become really, really difficult. And that gap.

[46:35] Sammie: The divide and the gap, which then grows and incompacts.

[46:37] Ollie: And that’s when you get people paying back far, far more than they borrowed for their education, which they were told that they effectively needed to get. And that’s something that we don’t think is fair at all.

[46:48] Sammie: Do you agree then perhaps like some professions should have different weightings? So, for example, like we need to have more doctors or engineers or AI engineers, which was going to be my next question. You know, this is getting close to AI Mageddon. Yeah, yeah. Um, like, do we weight those slightly differently to someone who goes and does a PR degree? Like, would you agree with that or not?

[47:14] Ollie: I mean, that’s not something that our campaign is focusing on. I think that, you know, these are again all political choices. If that was a policy that was put forward by future governments that people thought was a really good idea, then it’s well within their rights to do that. I don’t think it’s necessarily for our campaign to decide which are the most beneficial, you know, uh uh professions. I think also where it gets difficult there is you can obviously look at things as a purely like monetary, which professions do we need to boost, you know, GDP the most because they’re going to be really high-paying jobs. But then, you know, you also need nurses and teachers. And whilst those jobs might not be paying, you know, huge amounts of money, they are still very important.

[48:05] Sammie: Well, the backbone of a flowing economy, right? Yeah. Health and growth and education.

[48:10] Ollie: So I think it’s whilst obviously thinking about the monetary benefit of certain degrees can be a useful thing to think about how valuable that degree is to the individual taking it. I think you need to be careful we need we need to be careful um by judging the value of a degree solely based on people’s earnings after it.

[48:31] Sammie: Yeah, because I mean, I mean the what what made me think of that, right, is because, for example, in um in Australia, if you do move over there, the reason why I know that is that there’s like a literally a list of jobs where they’re like, you get preferential treatment because you have skills in space. So we want people like you in this country, which makes sense because like it’s like, well, they’re going to actively contribute to an economy which requires these things. Well, we could do the same thing with like favorable rates to certain areas or you know, whatever that may well be. An AI engineer, a coder, or whatever that might well be, you know, the the actual jobs escape me now, but it could be a way of just like driving uh uh uh more growth into areas which we’re gonna need as a country or we lack.

[49:19] Ollie: Yeah, potentially. I mean, I guess again, that’s not really what our campaign is focusing on. We want a system that’s fairer for all graduates, or yeah, particularly these people affected by the plan two loans, but also at the moment, so for example, with the plan five loan, that has an interest rate at the moment of RPI inflation. So we want the interest rates on student loans to be capped at CPI inflation. So, what that means in simple terms, the consumer price index is the official measure of inflation in the UK economy. The retail price index, which is used to determine interest rates on student loans, is normally about 1% higher than the consumer price index. And RPI isn’t really used for much of anything else. Yeah, they’re used for a very small selection of things. But we think that using the official measure of inflation is obviously the right thing to do because using RPI means that interest rates are already 1% higher than they should have been. So I think there are things like that that will in our campaign that will address, you know, the plan five loans and some of the other plans as well.

[50:29] Sammie: I honestly wish you like all the best. I really hope this podcast gets out there as well, and you know, we can start having these open conversations and and really sort of challenging the government on this because it is affecting so many young people. We we feel like we’re sort of handcuffed at the moment. AI is on the way, we’re all worried about that. You know, we’re going people that have come out of university are finding it way harder to get into the you know the earlier stage jobs because of AI, which is then making the plans even harder for them to then complete. So there’s kind of this catch sort of situation right now, and we’re in quite a tumult, you know, turbulent time. And I just feel like this could be a really sort of breath of fresh air for those young people and galvanize them to support the this country and could provide to this economy, which we know is important.

[51:20] Ollie: Yeah, I think it’s really important that we make our voices heard on this. I think we probably have been guilty of letting it slide under the radar for a bit too long.

[51:30] Sammie: It’s kind of like your pension, isn’t it? It’s just like, oh, you’re just like, oh, whatever, I’ll deal with it later. And then uh you look at it and you go, I really need to do something about it.

[51:39] Ollie: We need to act now on student loans, it’s unfair. People are rightly angry, and we do have the power to force change, I really believe. There are millions of us. We’ll be a significant voting block. And as we’ve seen with other generations in the UK, generations that vote with their feet tend to tend to win, yeah. Tend to get economic policy that is sort of favoured towards them. So we we can’t just let this carry on as it is, otherwise, we’re gonna be suffering the consequences for most of our lives.

[52:12] Sammie: You’ve been everywhere last past week. Yeah, yeah. We spoke on the phone, and you’ve just, you know, you’ve been in the FT, LBC, like you’ve been absolutely everywhere, and rightly so. And so um what’s next for you? Like, what’s the big voices that you want involved in this? Martin Lewis has has changed his stance recently a touch and Yeah, well, I’d love to speak to Martin Lewis about it.

[52:33] Ollie: I think he’s obviously got such a platform, and um, it would be great to see what his thoughts are on this. He’s obviously said that he thinks that the recent threshold freezes are immoral and has sort of asked the Chancellor to think about reversing them. Um where do we go from here in terms of the campaign? We want to involve as many people as we can, and that’s not just people with these loans, but you know, we’re increasingly getting parents of people who have these loans and they’re realising the impact it’s going to have on their lives. So we want to grow our movement and get people signing up on our website. We’ve got uh an email template that people can send to their MP really, really quickly. Nice. Takes less than 30 seconds and it pre-populates everything. It’s great. Um, and we’re looking to engage more policymakers. We’re already speaking to MPs. We realise this is gonna be like a really concerted, it’s gonna need a lot of effort, but we’re willing to put that effort in.

[53:36] Sammie: 2026, man, it’s gonna be your year. I can feel it.

[53:38] Ollie: Yeah, it’s not we’re not going anywhere, and it’s only I feel like we’ve just it’s like a snowball, you know. We’ve started the ball rolling and it’s just gonna pick up more momentum, and we just can’t let that momentum ease off because we need to take it to them.

[53:53] Sammie: I agree, and that’s why I was so excited to have this conversation. So, like, we will leave those links in the description right now. Please go on that website, definitely drop Ollie a follow on Instagram. It does do some funny uh reels, which I’ve really enjoyed, man. They’re really funny them. Well, we like eat a bit of breakfast and then talked about it. I loved it, it was great. But um, this is important, this is important for your kids. This is important if you were part of the plan too, but even if you’re not, this is an important issue to get this economy rolling. So um I’m really, really proud to hopefully help support and bring a few more people and a few more voices your way, man. But yeah, um, where do we send people if they don’t find those links there and they come to this or they’re just on the on the move and we need to put it in their brains?

[54:36] Ollie: Yeah, so we’re at rethink repayment on Instagram and TikTok and www.rethinkrepayment.com.

[54:44] Sammie: Nice. Okay, mate. Well, thank you so much, and I wish you all the best with this campaign. Yeah, let’s let’s been great.

[54:50] Ollie: Yeah, it’s been good fun. See us.