A parliamentary committee voted yesterday to abolish maintenance grants for poorer students, replacing them with larger maintenance loans.

Currently, university students from families with a household income of £25,000 or less are entitled to a grant of £3,387 a year, an amount which decreases as household income increases up to £42,620, when students are no longer eligible for a grant.

Under the plans approved yesterday, from September 2016 students will get a higher loan of up to £8,200, but all of this will be required to be repaid once a graduate begins to earn over £21,000 a year. The plans will only affect students from England.

In a study published after the plans were initially proposed in July, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) wrote that the plans “will raise debt for poorer students, but do little to improve the government finances in the long run”.

According to the IFS study, the poorest 40 per cent of students will now graduate with debts of up to £53,000, as opposed to the current figure of £40,500.

However, when the cuts were first announced, Chancellor George Osborne said that the grants were becoming “unaffordable”. He stated that “There is a basic unfairness in asking taxpayers to fund the grants of people who are likely to earn a lot more than them”.

Speaking to Varsity, a student who currently receives a full maintenance grant said of the cuts: “This is really worrying. Students from poorer backgrounds will now face an even larger burden of debt, and that’s got to be a concern in terms of access. I rely on the financial support from maintenance grants and bursaries from both my college and the university - I can only hope that Cambridge will step in to support students like me.”

Another student added: “the lack of maintenance grants would really have made me rethink attending university”.

However, a student in receipt of the full Student Finance payout defended the government’s measures, saying that: “People need to calm down and look beyond the sensationalist headlines. What the government is proposing does not reduce the amount of money available to students from low-income backgrounds – in fact, it increases the amount of money they are eligible for, which is a welcomed change for people like me who wouldn’t be able to attend university without this financial support”.

They continued: “The fact that people who need the money will not be disadvantaged by these reforms cannot be overstated. The crucial change is from a grant to a loan, and the alleged increase in student debt that it will incur”.

The lack of a vote in the Commons over the plans has led some, including the National Union of Students (NUS) to accuse the government of “avoiding a debate”.

The Labour MP for Cambridge, Daniel Zeichner, also condemned the move as “democratically unviable” and a “transparent attempt by the government to circumnavigate parliament”.

Zeichner added that the changes were “not just a technical change to the law”, but “a serious shift directly affecting thousands of individuals from the most disadvantaged backgrounds”

The Labour MP Wes Streeting, who sits on the committee which voted in favour of the plans, condemned the government’s use of what he termed “an obscure parliamentary process”, claiming that “the poorest students will be hit the hardest”.

Writing in the Huffington Post yesterday, Streeting said that it was “scandalous” that such a “major” political decision had been taken in this way, describing the government’s behaviour as “underhand and undemocratic”. The motion, which was passed 10-8, will now be debated in the House of Lords at a later date.

CUSU’s Access and Funding Officer Helena Blair stated that the government’s decision to “saddle future university students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds with thousands of pounds more debt than their peers” was “disgraceful”. She said that CUSU is “seriously concerned about the implications these changes will have on prospective students’ confidence and ability to enter higher education, the progression rates of students onto expensive postgraduate courses, and the widening hole in the UK’s economy as more and more graduates are unable to pay their loans.” She also highlighted the bursaries available to Cambridge students from the Collegiate University in supporting financially disadvantaged backgrounds, arguing that they have become “critical to inspiring and supporting prospective applicants.”