Theresa May pledges to freeze tuition fees and extend Help to Buy scheme ahead of Tory conference

Theresa May is set to announce that tuition fees will be frozen at £9,250, as part of an effort by the Tories to appeal to younger voters who have deserted them in droves.

Speaking ahead of the Conservative Party Conference, the Prime Minister told the Sun on Sunday there will be an increase in the repayment threshold, meaning graduates only start paying their loans back once they are earning £25,000.

The fees were set to rise again this year by another £250, but the pledge to keep them at more than £9,000 falls far short of Labour's controversial £10bn promise to scrap tuition fees. The Tory pledge will leave graduates around £360 a year better off.

The changes to the loan system will be accompanied with another pledge to extend the Help to Buy scheme, with Ms May acknowledging that the generation gap in terms of wealth and opportunity has opened up in the country.

The general election saw an overwhelming majority of younger voters back Jeremy Corbyn over the Conservatives, which appears to have spooked Tory strategists.

Ms May said: "Too many young people fear they are going to be worse off than their parents.

"We have listened to those concerns and we are going to act to offer a fairer deal for students and young people."

Tuition fees were first introduced by Tony Blair's New Labour Government in 1998 at a maximum of £1,000 a year on a means-tested basis, but have since risen dramatically along with the expansion of higher education. This year's intake of students is expected to graduate with an average debt of around £50,000.

The Government's plans to overhaul higher education could also see the introduction of fast-track, two-year degree courses in order to keep the costs down for those who might be deterred from higher education by the prospect of such a substantial debt - much of which is destined never to be paid back.

The Conservatives are also considering cutting interest rates on student loan repayments - which have rocketed for recent graduates.

With the number of first-time buyers falling steadily, the Prime Minister will pledge another £10 billion to expand the Help to Buy scheme, which attracted criticism for artificially inflating prices in the already overheated London housing market.

The extra funding will go to a further 135,000 first-time buyers, allowing them to get a mortgage on a new-built home with a deposit of just 5 per cent.

Ms May said: "The idea that once you got a job you'd be able to buy your own home and start a family is no longer a given.

"The only way we'll fix that is building more homes over time. But we are going to do more now to help support those who want to buy but can't quite afford it."

At last week's Labour conference, Mr Corbyn pledged to bring in rent controls to tackle the soaring cost of renting for the growing numbers of people, including many graduates and older voters, living in the private rental rector who have little prospect of ever buying their own home.

A new opinion poll shows that more than twice as many people under the age of 45 think Mr Corbyn's Labour Party is now "on their side" compared to those who believe the same about the Tories.

The survey by Opinium suggests that it is no longer just the very young or very poor who vote Labour - with the traditional orthodoxy being that people shift politically to the right as they get older - but that those well into their thirties and forties are remaining on the Left.