Following the announcement by the Liberal Democrats that nearly £2m in bonuses have been paid to staff at the Student Loans Company (SLC), Lib Dem parliamentary spokesman for Newcastle East Greg Stone and local Liberal Youth members are calling on the civil servants and staff responsible for the student loans fiasco to pay their bonuses back into the system so that they can be paid to the 100,000 students who are still waiting for financial support.
Greg Stone said: "It is completely unacceptable that anyone working in the shambolic SLC should have received a bonus. Those at the top of the SLC knew that this year's problems were a possibility, yet they sat and did nothing about it.
We are calling upon those who received bonuses to pay them back to the SLC so that they can be used to pay the 100,000 students STILL waiting for their loans the financial support their owed, and to employ additional staff in order to clear the current backlog. It is difficult to escape the view that Ralph Seymour-Jackson, Chief Executive of the SLC should resign over this fiasco. Instead, Labour are paying him a bonus".
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