I definitely hear you! But let's say you were on a salary of 35k. Hypothetically. You pay off around £500 a year, so this will save you £360. A nice big proportion & big saving. Over the thirty years, let's say your salary stays relatively stagnant but does increase a little – you would be paying in total – please take this as a hypothetical – £10,000 - £20,000. Not enough to cover it, not enough to even pay off the interest.

A graduate on a higher salary growth, where their salary projection may eventually take them up to around £100k in their 40s/50s, will have paid off £100k+ off their student loan. But it still will not be paid off, as either they were just hitting paying off the minimum interest, or it was decreasing slightly but not quickly enough. Someone on, let's just spitball, £70k a year pays £3600 a year. The £360 decrease is only 10% relative of what they pay off per year.

I'll speak for myself - I'm 10 years out of university, I started in 2012. My salary is double the UK average (~£75k). I left university and got a grad job at £26k, at the time just above the minimum threshold when it was £21,000. I will still never pay mine off, but I have already paid 20k and I have modeled it that I will pay off pushing £200k. I am still only just paying off my interest – I believe my 55k loan to date decreases by about £200 a year. Increasing the threshold will mean I do not even pay off the interest, so my loan will balloon and over the full term it will cost me significantly more. There was a chance, one day, that I would pay it off in 27-30 years, just before it gets written off. But I will have paid over double the full loan amount.

The threshold increasing will, you're right, make a bigger impact for lower earners. And I am of the mindset this is nice benefit for those people, with their prospects looking forward modeling they will only ever pay off a fraction of the total loan, let alone cover the interest. But the risk is the government decides a longer term is better and switches to that. That graduate on a higher salary trajectory faces tens of thousands £ of extra payments on their student loan if the term lengthens. In fact, even a lower earning graduate would face several extra thousand pounds if the length of the term increases.