Thousands of EU students owe £20 million in unpaid loans but just nine have been taken to court EU students account for one in 20 of the total number of undergraduates and postgraduates in UK universities, with strong demand from Ireland, Germany, France, Greece, Poland and Cyprus in particular. They pay the same fees as British students, whereas students from non-EU countries pay much higher fees. EU students have been eligible since 2006 for loans subsidised by UK taxpayers to cover tuition fees, meaning the first payments were due in 2009. Money owed by graduates living in the UK is recovered automatically through the tax system as soon as they earn £15,000, rising to £21,000 following this year's increase in tuition fees. Outside the UK, however, there is no repayment mechanism. Officials have to rely on foreign graduates giving up-to-date information about their earnings and making their own payment arrangements. Many of the foreign students who took out loans have returned to their home countries and thousands have either failed to inform the Student Loans Company (SLC) of their whereabouts or let their repayments drop. Among the 2,100 foreign non-payers revealed in the figures from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), three-quarters have been assessed in the category "not currently repaying - further information required to establish correct repayment status," suggesting that the SLC has lost track of them. A UK-based "tracing and collection agency" is being used to target these students and if found, fines can be added to their loan balances. If repayments are not forthcoming, legal action can be undertaken to recover the full balance. But the figure shows that officials have rarely exercised their power to obtain judgments in British courts, which can then be enforced by those in other EU countries. The total cost of bringing legal action against the nine EU students was £17,495, less than £2,000 per student. Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment research at Buckingham University, said: "One of the weaknesses of the fees and loans system is the difficulty in recovering money from a number of groups, and chief among them is students that come from the 26 other European countries. We really ought to be able to negotiate though the European Union a set of procedures that can enable us to recover this money. Emma Boon, campaign director at the Taxpayers Alliance, called for the process of tracing foreign students to be made more rigorous. "The SLC needs to be more diligent about checks before it hands over the cash to foreign students so that UK taxpayers are not left to pay off mountains of student debt and the Treasury is not left short-changed," she said. Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said that non-repayment by overseas students was "inherent in the system." The SLC said that since EU students became liable for repayment in 2009, the amount repaid by EU graduates had increased each year. "We are currently in the process of reviewing accounts both UK and EU borrowers who are known to reside overseas and who are in arrears, with a view to issuing legal proceedings against those who do not respond to initial letters," a spokesman said. A spokesman for the BIS said: "The majority of overseas borrowers are honest and want to repay the loans they have received. However all borrowers need to know that they cannot evade their obligation to repay simply by moving overseas. We actively trace those in arrears and will obtain court orders in other jurisdictions to require repayment if necessary. The SLC is currently in the process of selecting a number of individuals to take through the litigation process.