725 signatories join NUS pledge to vote against fee hike, but among these only 10 Conservatives

Hundreds of politicians standing for election have promised to vote against raising university tuition fees in the next parliament, it emerged today.

The National Union of Students (NUS) has asked MPs and candidates across England to sign a pledge to vote against a fee hike.

Some 725 have done so. They will be standing for election in 437 out of the 533 constituencies in the country.

But just 10 of those who have signed are Conservative candidates. Nearly 200 represent Labour and more than 300 are standing for the Liberal Democrats.

It comes ahead of an independent review, commissioned by the government, into whether tuition fees should rise. The review, led by the former BP chief executive Lord Browne, will report after the general election. Before this, Labour and the Conservatives will not say whether they support a hike in fees, which are currently at £3,225 a year. Some vice-chancellors have argued for a rise in fees to more than £5,000.

The Liberal Democrats are the only party to hold a position on fees. They have promised to scrap fees by phasing them out over six years.

Speaking at the NUS annual conference in Gateshead, Wes Streeting, the union's president, said MPs and candidates would lose the student vote if they supported a rise in fees.

NUS has called for a graduate tax to replace fees. Graduates would contribute to a national trust between 0.3% and 2.5% of their salaries each month, over 20 years. The contributions would depend on a graduate's salary. A graduate on £40,000 would pay £125 a month, while someone on £16,000 would pay £5.

Streeting said: "We are determined to hold parliamentary candidates to account, and help students in every constituency to understand which of those candidates is prepared to back student interests."

He said that students should conclude that, because only 10 Tory candidates had signed the pledge, a Conservative government would be "ideologically disposed to hiking up fees and represents a significant threat to the millions of students who are looking for real change through a fairer funding system".

"We believe strongly that higher education should get a major public subsidy ... it is shameful that no political party is prepared to say whether they would protect higher education from further budget cuts if they come to power," he said.

Streeting said students were paying more in rent and "hidden course costs", such as textbooks. "We need to challenge institutions on value for money and stick to our tough line that students in the future simply will not pay more for less, or more for the same," he said.

However, he admitted that many of those who benefit from higher education go on to be wealthy and work in the City.

"Some groups have come to this conference with a supposed solution to the funding crisis that says: just shove more public money into the system because for every pound you bung in, you get two and a half pounds back. Well that may be true, but what matters is where that extra one pound fifty magically reappears. I'll tell you where, it reappears in the wealthy south. It pops up again in Canary Wharf, destined to be recycled into a frothy, skinny cappuccino. It flies off on adventure holidays in south America ... We need funding policies – across the whole of education – that focus limited resources on those who need them the most."

Tomorrow, NUS will announce its new president. The candidates are Aaron Porter, NUS Vice President (Higher Education), Bell Ribeiro-Addy, NUS Black Students Officer and Chris Marks, Vice president (Education), Hull University Students' Union.