Chancellor Gordon Brown has been warned that any concessions on tuition fees in Scotland could lead to serious repercussions for Labour in the rest of Britain.

Two Labour backbenchers said that if the party relaxes its opposition to abolishing tuition fees it could provide a major political headache.

The issue has been a major bone of contention between Labour and its Liberal Democrat partners in the Scottish Executive.

The issue, which has threatened to wreck the coalition, led to the setting up of a committee under leading lawyer and businessman Andrew Cubie to examine the whole area of student finance.

The committee reported in December and said tuition fees had been "discredited".

It called for them to be replaced with a Scottish Graduate Endowment which would require students to pay �3,075 towards the cost of their degree once their earnings reach �25,000.

It also called for bursaries of �4,100 to be given to students from poor families living away from home.

The report has been scrutinised by Scottish Executive ministers who will decide on whether to adopt its recommendations by the end of January.

MPs Phil Woolas and Jim Cousins said the Cubie proposals would be popular among students and their families elsewhere in the UK.

Mr Cousins, MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central, said: "I think people will find these proposals very attractive - what will worry people is why we aren't having them across the United Kingdom as a whole."

He said: "Of course it's a big political problem - it's a big political problem for English, Welsh and Irish MPs, who will have the difficulty of explaining why students from their areas don't have the same funding system that Scottish students have.

"And, incidentally, it's a double problem because most of us think the Scottish proposals are really, really good and take the whole discussion about student finance forward in a very sensible and creative way."

Similar reforms

The costs of implementing Cubie's proposals have been estimated at �62m in the first year, rising to �71m in the second and Mr Cousins said the chancellor would face pressure to come up with cash to fund similar reforms in the rest of the UK.

"It's a bit hard for Gordon Brown, as a Scots MP himself, whose constituents are going to benefit from these excellent proposals, to say to the rest of us that we can't have them because there's no money," added Mr Cousins.

Backbench colleague, Phil Woolas, said if Cubie's proposals went ahead, political problems could arise as a result of students at the same university being supported differently, depending on where they live.

"You will have students on the same course having different financial support systems because one's from Scotland, one not from Scotland, and that will cause parents and students themselves to ask their representatives how to justify this," said Mr Woolas, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth.

Mr Cubie said he hoped the Westminster government would examine some of his committee's proposals.

"I don't know how others will view our report elsewhere in the United Kingdom but I would hope, given that the wider community in Scotland - the civic society in Scotland - has welcomed our report, that some of that may echo across the border," he said.