Question: Is your party's position on top-up fees entirely opportunistic or partly principled?

Tim Collins: I think it is entirely principled because it is a bit odd for the party which is sticking to its manifesto pledge - which is us - to be accused of being unprincipled when the party which is breaking its manifesto pledge - the government - is supposedly being given credit for being principled.

I think that would be a fairly perverse interpretation of reality.

The other two things are first of all I think people would expect the Conservative Party to resist and oppose measures of social engineering. In the bill there is the creation of the access regulator and direct state intervention with university admissions which is something which is unique in the recent history of this country and something which people would expect the Conservatives to oppose and which we will.

The second thing is I think people would expect the Conservatives to oppose something which is economically inefficient and indeed economically incoherent.

And when you have a position when the government's own figures, which they published alongside the bill last week, show that for every pound that goes to the universities it will actually cost the taxpayer £1.25, that is on any basis a grossly inefficient way of operating.

So I think on the basis of what was put before the electorate at the last election, our traditional opposition to social engineering and the fact that the government's proposals simply don't add up, those are all individually good enough reasons for us to say that it is a principled stance to oppose it. If you put the three together I think there is no doubt about it.

Question: Was there not a mite of opportunism in the stance you took at the last election and has it not proved to be successful in recruiting Conservative members at universities?

Tim Collins: Well I wasn't writing the education policy of the party at the 2001 election but I imagine the reason that it was put in was the reason that the government put its own pledge in as well. That there was a consensus at that stage, a cross party consensus - and remember this is only two and half years ago - that top-up fees were not an efficient way of raising money for universities, that there would be a lot of disadvantages to it.

As I repeat, you can by all means argue with us on the merits but it is rather perverse to say that the people who are breaking their word to the electorate are principled and the people who are upholding their word are unprincipled.

Question: But is the guarantee the government gave not good for the lifetime of this parliament?

Tim Collins: There has been an attempt both by Charles Clarke and by Alan Johnson and one or two others to say 'oh well it was made clear at the time that it was for the lifetime of the parliament'. The wording of the Labour manifesto does not include any reference whatsoever to a time limit.

It simply states to quote the wording exactly "we will not introduce top-up fees and we have legislated to prevent them".

There is no statement that implies that that is temporary, that that is something that doesn't matter.

Furthermore, if we are going to go down the line saying that it was only a pledge for one parliament, which is not something I concede anyway, but if you are going to go down that route, it surely follows from that that they should not be legislating in the parliament that was elected at that particular time even for the provision of top-up fees in the next parliament. They should take the view that if we have said we have legislated against them there is a clear pledge there that we are not going to legislate for them in the parliament which is being elected a that election.

Question: Michael Howard says he believes in equality of opportunity, what is therefore wrong with the principle of fair access and regulating to achieve it?

Tim Collins: I think what is very clear is that it is not for the state to interfere with universities in terms of who should be admitted.

If you want to look at Michael's statement of principles he talks quite clearly and quite rightly about the need for a smaller state, for less intervention in people's lives. It is very consistent with that to object to intervention in what has hitherto been regarded as an independent sphere for universities which is admissions policy.

As far as equality of opportunity is concerned, it should be equality of opportunity on the basis of merit, not equality of opportunity on the basis of people getting in or being kept out on the basis of who their parents were or what school they went to.

If it is wrong - and indeed it is - for there to be any question of bias towards letting people in because they happen to go to a particular school or happen to come from a particular geographical area, if it is wrong to be biased in favour of people who come from more prosperous areas or have been to higher profile schools, it is equally wrong to do it the other way round. It should simply be on the basis of merit.

Question: Merit being mostly judged by universities to mean A Level results?

Tim Collins: Actually if you talk to the universities themselves, they will be the first to say to you that they go to great lengths to assess things in depths rather than on the basis of superficial A Level results.

Indeed increasingly a lot of the universities say that A Level grades are not as powerful an indicator as perhaps once they were of potential for academic success at university. Many of them will say they do go though very considerable exercises involving interviews and looking at the wider circumstances of a candidate.

But it is a matter for them, it is not something that should be dictated by Charles Clarke or indeed any other education secretary, Conservative or Labour.

Question: But the universities are in receipt of a fairly large amount of public funds, does that not give the public, via the government, the right to have some say in how they should be run?

Tim Collins: It means that the universities should be run, as I believe they largely are run, in accordance with the public interest.

But the public interest is fulfilled by actually having a largely independent university sector. That has value in all sorts of respects. Both in terms of preserving academic freedom, in terms of the quality of research work and in terms of being able to attract the best brains both in terms of students and teachers from around the world.

And all of those things would be seriously undermined if the reputation arose that in the United Kingdom universities were told by the state or an arm of the state which students they might or might not admit.

I think it could do crippling damage to the international reputation of UK higher education.

And interestingly, although many of the vice chancellors don't necessarily agree with us about the principle of top-up fees, they do agree with us that the access regulator is highly undesirable.

So there is more of a distinction between us in terms of how best do we get to our desired objective than there is a sort of sense from them that they think that the government's bill is a truly wonderful piece of legislation.

They object as strongly as we do to some parts of it. They simply take the view that they should swallow the bill and hope that some other things either will come out or won't do them much damage.

We take the view: lets get rid of the bill and start again from a clean sheet of paper.

Question: On the principle of variable fees do you not feel slightly uncomfortable being on the other side of the fence from the majority of vice chancellors, while the social democratic Labour government is with them in introducing a market into higher education?

Tim Collins: I don't think Mr Blair would happily have his government described as social democratic.

As far as the variability of the fees is concerned, we don't have the same objections to that which some of the Labour backbenchers do, but obviously we respect the principles and views which have led them to the conclusions that they reached on that.

Our objection is based on other criteria, as I've said, others measures within the bill and the fact that the mechanism which the government has erected is massively economically inefficient.

As far as the vice chancellors are concerned, what they have absolutely rightly thrown down as a challenge to all the politicians of all parties is to say that under successive governments, this wasn't something that started in 1997 by any means, funding per student has declined to a point which is questioning the ability of many of those institutions to maintain quality.

And that is something that all of us in politics have to address, we can no longer ignore that, that is absolutely right.

However the government's so-called solution doesn't actually improve matters. Funding per student on the Institute of Fiscal Studies figures, produced independently of any party, would actually go down. And therefore the government's so-called solution actually makes the problem worse.

I think it is perfectly legitimate for us therefore to say we are against a solution which makes the problem it is designed to address worse. And we will work on and we will produce, as Michael Howard has made clear well in time for the next election, an alternative that does actually make progress towards solving this solution.

Question: Without giving full details, what are the principles that will underpin the policy you will take into the next election?

Tim Collins: I'll set out three fundamental ones. The first is that access to higher education should be on the basis of ability, not ability to pay.

The second is that universities should over time become more independent of the state, not more dependent on the state for instruction and for funding.

And thirdly, that our view is that we do recognise that higher education has a hugely important part to play in the international and regional competitiveness of the UK but that higher education is not simply an extension of corporate R and D. There are very important things that higher education needs to be doing in terms of broadening the mind of the people that go through it and in serving and expanding the culture and the literature and the sense of identity of the nation that they happen to be in.

Now, how do you translate those three principles into policy? As you rightly say, we are not at the moment in a position to start announcing the details of our policy.

But we have made it clear that the direction in which we want to go is that over a time period - it is not likely to be as short as a single parliament it is likely to be considerably longer than that, maybe a 15 or 20 year period - moves towards the universities having much more independence and therefore greater reliance on new or additional sources of funding which are not either in the gift or whim of an individual chancellor or dependent - as the government's proposals do - on votes up and down in the House of Commons, that isn't really independence, which certainly involves complete independence for universities on admissions policy which is the diametric opposite of what the government are proposing in their bill.

And as far as access on ability rather than ability to pay is concerned, the reason we have set out our objection to top-up fees is precisely because we do believe the academic research which has indicated the government's proposals would have a very significant deterrent effect, not just on those at the bottom end of the income scale but elsewhere too, who would be guided towards making certain choices about their higher education on the basis of how much it would cost rather than what makes sense for them.

Question: Are you saying that Oxford and Cambridge currently operate fair access procedures when statistics show their intakes to be far below national averages of ethnic minority, working class and state school pupils?

Tim Collins: I think Oxbridge are doing their very level best to address that.

What has actually happened if you look at the figures over a 30 or 40 year time period is that things were a lot better 30 or 40 years ago when you had selective secondary education.

It is hardly surprising that if you have highly selective higher education institutions as Oxbridge is and ought to be, that it is going to be much more difficult to get state pupils to go to Oxford and Cambridge if you no longer have on a large scale selective state education than in the era when you did.

It is rather perverse I think for the Labour Party, who have campaigned for many many years for the complete extermination of the remaining grammar schools, the remaining element of selection within secondary schools, to then turn round and say that there is something clearly going wrong when the state sector is not providing as many pupils as once it did to the selective tertiary sector.

Either selection has a value or it doesn't have a value but it has consequences if you pursue it.

The other thing I would say about Oxbridge is that what Oxbridge should be about - and indeed what the Russell Group should be about - is the providing of the very best education to the very best minds.

And those minds will be found in all kinds of communities, from all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of socio-economic groupings. But what is making it very difficult for those from non-traditional backgrounds to go to Oxbridge, is not so much that Oxbridge is turning them away, as they are encouraged by a whole climate of things not to apply in the first place.

If you actually have a chancellor of the exchequer who is going around making wild and utterly inaccurate allegations about the way in which Oxbridge treats people who apply from comprehensive schools, that in itself makes the problem worse because it actually results in a number of pupils who would have the aptitude to go and would probably be accepted if they did apply, choosing not to apply.

Question: Would you, in a bid to achieve fair access without excessive regulation, be in favour of something similar to the American SAT tests as an alternative to or to complement A Levels?

Tim Collins: I am intrigued by that because some vice chancellors, although by no means all, have said that they see some merit in the SATs.

The advantages of the SATs as far as the American experience is, is that first of all they don't seem to have the same sort of debate that we have in this country about whether exam standards are being watered down or not. There is a general acceptance in the United States that those tests over the last 30 years are as objective now as they were 30 years ago.

There seems to be a much greater correlation between performance in the SATs and subsequent academic performance in the tertiary sector than is now regarded as being the case, at least by some universities, with at least some A Levels.

And the third advantage of the SATs system is that it is generally felt that again it doesn't have some of the things we were talking about, it is felt that SATs are a fair assessment, independent of socio-economic background.

So those are three very powerful advantages. On the other hand I do recognise the fact that a number of people within the UK education system have said to me that there are some drawbacks with them.

They are felt not to be necessarily applicable on this side of the Atlantic. There are differences of opinion within the universities and between the universities as to whether the SATs are better or not.

And therefore the short answer is that we are intrigued by it, we are looking at it but we have yet to reach final conclusions.

Question: When the vote comes on the Higher Education Bill, are you expecting many rebels to come back to the government and indeed any of your own MPs to defy the Conservative whip?

Tim Collins: As far as the Labour side is concerned you will have to talk to people in the Labour Party. Obviously we are merely observers of that and can't really judge.

But it needs to be put in the context that the government has a majority of 160 plus. It would be quite astonishing if they were to lose or to come anywhere close to losing and I would not at this stage predict that they will.

If you look at what happened under John Major's government, when he started off with a majority of 21 and ended up with no majority at all, he only lost three votes in the whole of that time.

Although the folk memory is that he was constantly suffering rebellions and constantly losing, in fact he only lost three votes in a five year parliament.

So at the moment I would have to say we would be frankly astonished if the government were to lose and what happens on the Labour side is something you need to talk to them about.

As far as our side is concerned, the overwhelming majority of Conservative MPs are entirely content with and indeed utterly determined to pursue our opposition to the government's bill.

I think some of the attempts that have been around to talk up the potential of a large scale Conservative switch to support the government are grossly exaggerated.

There may be one or two of our colleagues - and there are one or two who have gone on record as saying that they feel so strongly about this issue that they may contemplate voting with the government, I'm not excluding that entirely.

But I do stress that we are talking about a handful, we are not talking about a significant number.

Question: Are you expecting another funding crisis this year or have the government resolved the problem?

Tim Collins: I think the truth is somewhere in between. I don't think it will be as serious as it was last year.

I think the government recognised they made a major miscalculation last year, they hadn't taken into account a number of things, some of which frankly actually were part of their own actions like the national insurance increase and they have taken steps to plug the gap.

The signals that we are getting back at the moment from local education authorities are that the scale of the problem that arose last year is not likely to repeat itself this year.

But there are individual local authorities where there are still very acute problems. For example I had a meeting with a cross party group from Poole Local Education Authority including a number of head teachers.

They are saying that in their area, not only will they still have problems this year, but the cumulative effect of the funding cutbacks last year and this mean that at the level of individual schools, they will be worse resourced in the coming financial year than they were back in 1997, which is quite extraordinary.

I don't regard that as typical by the way, I think in most areas most schools have got considerably greater resources than they had in 1997.

But it is an indication of how badly the government has handled all of this that there should be any schools in the country, after all the extra taxes and extra spending that have been put in, that should actually have to be saying that they will have to employ fewer teachers and fewer teaching assistants than they did six years ago.

Question: There have been reports that Downing Street is considering the radical option of all but doing away with LEAs altogether and funding schools directly. Would that not be another case of the government stealing Tory clothes and outflanking you on this issue?

Tim Collins: What is certainly true is that this is an option that was looked at various times under past governments both Conservative and Labour. It is not a startlingly original thought that has only just struck like a bolt of lightening into the present Number 10 policy unit.

The record of the matter is that though past Conservative administrations or past Conservative policy advisers looked at it, they never decided to go down that route.

We will obviously like them, be wanting to look both at how do you address the underlying difficulties relating to local government finance. There is a widespread consensus that the recent rises in council tax are entirely unsustainable and also grossly unfair.

And also we will want to look at ways in which we can maximise the financial independence and leeway of schools.

The government has effectively done a bit of a u-turn. They came in abolishing grant maintained status. And actually in terms of most of the things that grant maintained schools had they have now given that to most secondary schools these days.

The idea is intriguing. I'm not at all sure that the government will go down that route, after the Independent report that they were going to look at it there was a Guardian story the next day which largely knocked it down.

We are looking at developing policies which provide the primary focus not so much at shifting the border of decision making between different aspects of the state, i.e. does the funding come from central government or county hall, we are actually looking at policies which would put much greater financial power and purchasing power in the hands of parents.

And those are policies which we are still developing but which I think would be, if they come to fruition, quite drastic sidestepping of that whole issue. Because I don't actually get the sense that most parents really care that much whether the school is painted on the orders of the local education authority or on the orders of the Department for Education.

They may be much more interested in a much greater extent of influence and choice in their own hands.

Question: How is the new opposition team structure working in education and do you feel any frustration that although you are technically the shadow secretary of state for education, you are effectively number three behind Tim Yeo and Michael Howard?

Tim Collins: We are all behind Michael Howard, obviously. But the issue of the new structure I actually think is working rather well in actual fact.

It is a departure from how we have done things in the past. Michael Howard has made it clear that the sort of Shadow Cabinet is not an alternative government as such. It is a campaigning structure and he's got a range of shadow secretaries of state who are outside the Shadow Cabinet as well as inside.

I think it is enabling us to look at the cross-cutting issues in which there are several in the health and education field.

It is enabling us to make sure that the dozen people or so who are within the Shadow Cabinet are getting that rather higher media profile, which is desirable. It was always very difficult when you had a very large Shadow Cabinet as we had under the previous leader when there were 30 of us, it was actually very difficult for any of us to get much of a media profile and therefore there is sense in slimming that down.

And I have an extremely good working relationship both with Tim Yeo and Andrew Lansley. Andrew I have known for a very, very long time. We have worked together in different fields for well over a decade and Tim and I get on on an extremely good basis. I think it is working well.

Question: So do Andrew Lansley and yourself decide the policies and Tim Yeo sell them to the public?

Tim Collins: I wouldn't put it like that no, I think that is if I may say so slightly mischievous.

It is certainly true that we work through policy collectively and we present policy collectively.

And Tim Yeo has gone on record as saying that rather than there being one person trying to do the entirety of two portfolios, it is actually the two most important public service portfolios having three people, of whom he is very clearly the leader, out there seeking both to produce policy and present it.

Question: But if there was an election tomorrow would there not only be two Cabinet jobs?

Tim Collins: Well that is an interesting point and we will come to that when we come to the election.