Most Scots want to end free tuition and personal care

FREE university tuition and personal care for the elderly should be scrapped, say more than half of Scots.

The cost of providing the flagship policies has soared in recent years, with £500million a year spent on personal care for the elderly. A further £230million goes on university fees for Scottish and EU students.

Former first minister Alex Salmond famously declared ‘rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scottish students’.

However, the latest Panelbase survey has revealed 53 per cent of Scots want students to pay for their own education.

A majority of the 1,020 people polled said they should fund their tuition with a graduate tax, while 47 per cent believe free degrees should continue.

Free personal care for the elderly was introduced by Labour in 2001, but 53 per cent now believe entitlement should depend on a person’s financial resources.

Tuition fees were abolished by Mr Salmond in 2007. The policy has been criticised after evidence suggesting Scotland sends fewer youngsters from poorer backgrounds to university than England and Wales, despite fees there of up to £9,000 a year.

Yesterday Scottish Conservative education spokesman Liz Smith backed calls for free tuition to be scrapped, saying the policy was unsustainable, did little to help the poorest gain entry and ‘dried up much-needed funding for our universities’.

But Deputy First Minister John Swinney said: ‘The Scottish social contract was a central plank of the manifesto on which the SNP Government was elected just last year.’