The prime minister has admitted to mistakes in the handling of the government's Higher Education Bill.

Giving evidence to the Commons liaison committee on Tuesday, Tony Blair conceded that Downing Street should have released more of the advice it received on the issue of increasing university tuition fees.

"I actually accept in retrospect, it would have been better had we published a lot more information about the nature of the problem than we actually did," he said.

"And one of the things that I've tried to initiate both internally in the Labour Party and then externally, is to try to put more public information out on a policy issue like this.

"The only thing I say to you is that my experience of these things is you can put out an awful lot of information... until the bill comes before the House, people don't really, really focus on it.

"And so sometimes I have people saying to me, 'well why didn't you tell us about the universities and all the rest of it, going back a year'. Well actually, we did, but people weren't terribly interested in it."

The second Commons reading of the bill, which will allow universities to set fees at up to £3,000 per year, was passed last week with a majority of just five votes.

Policy formation

The prime minister has been criticised for imposing policy upon departments and his party.

Addressing the senior MPs, Blair insisted that the policy came out of discussions between Downing Street and the Department for Education and Skills, although it was introduced in his speech to the Labour Party conference.

"After the last election, I found there was considerable concern among people at large at the payment of upfront fees and the whole issue to do with tuition fees," he said.

"And it was also the case that the universities themselves were saying that their financial situation was bleak and difficult unless there was a fundamental change in the way that the university system was funded.

"There were then discussions that took place in government, first of all Estelle [Morris] was secretary of state, then afterwards when Charles Clarke was secretary of state. And that resulted in a white paper a year ago."

"I think the department were well aware that it needed to be tackled, and in any event we were receiving very strong representations from the university sector," he added.

The prime minister rejected claims that there he had multiple options for reform of student finance.

"I'm always a bit bemused when I read that there's 40 different options we had. I never came across that," he said."There were basically only two, you either got more money out of the taxpayer or the student pays more."