For too long, student finance has been the subject our party would rather avoid. I understand why. It is uncomfortable territory. The scars of the coalition run deep, and many of us have heard about them on doorsteps ever since.

But we cannot keep kicking the can down the road. Millions of graduates are paying the price. If we want to win back the trust of my generation – the graduates who signed up to Plan 2 loans between 2012 and 2023, and the growing cohort on the new Plan 5 loans – we have to offer them a solution.

That is why I have brought forward a Ten Minute Rule Bill calling for a proper review of student finance, including the terms graduates were sold. The cross-party Treasury Committee has already found that the way loans were promoted amounted to mis-selling, and that the Government has “a moral obligation” to reverse the latest threshold freeze. The Government has refused.

Let’s be honest about how we got here. Today’s system bears little resemblance to the one introduced under the coalition. That scheme promised a repayment threshold that would rise with earnings, and it kept maintenance grants for the poorest students.

Since then, successive governments have bolted on change after change. Grants scrapped. Thresholds frozen again and again. Terms rewritten after students had already signed. What remains is a Frankenstein’s monster that nobody would design from scratch.

None of that lets us off the hook. It is uncomfortable to admit, but we were part of this story, and we should say so. We should also say what this system has become: regressive and illiberal.

It is regressive because it hits hardest those with least. The poorer your family, the more you have to borrow, so the students from the lowest-income homes graduate with the biggest debts. Every threshold freeze drags lower earners into repaying more, on money they were promised they would keep. Graduates on maternity leave, or those who cannot work full time because of ill health, watch their balances balloon while their earnings stall.

It is illiberal because the state has handed itself powers no other lender would ever be allowed. It sells loans to 18-year-olds on one set of terms, then changes them at will, having written itself out of the consumer protections everyone else must follow. And the system now distorts people’s choices about their own lives: public sector workers turning down promotions, doctors turning down shifts, young couples putting off having children.

We have a system that turns education into decades of rising debt, on terms that can change at any moment.

This is our fight. Members, councillors and parliamentarians across the party are living with these loans. I am one of them: the first in my family to go to university, with more than £65,000 still outstanding.

So let’s make the liberal case out loud. Fairness for existing borrowers. Honesty about terms. A system that rewards aspiration rather than punishing it. That is how we start to earn back a generation’s trust.

We can’t kick the can any longer. Being liberal means being willing to fix what’s broken, even when it’s uncomfortable.

* Tom Gordon is the Liberal Democrat MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough.