Ignore the Russell Group thing. It's a red herring.
I just took at look at Law at each of those universities on The Uni Guide, which include details from the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey and the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset. I was expecting it to show me that Law graduates from Surrey earned less, and I was going to point out that the £5000 scholarship would be offset by that lower income. However, it shows the opposite.
Under the "What are graduates doing after six months?" we see that Law graduate from Manchester have an average salary of £18,000, from Leeds have an average salary of £19,000, and from Surrey have an average salary of £21,000. (This could obviously be down to regional variations, with students tending to work near where they studied, with salaries in the south of England being higher than the north.)
OK, so perhaps the Surrey graduates earn more to begin with, but don't in the medium term. Nope. Five years after graduating the median earnings of Law graduates from all three universities is £36,000.
But are they all actually working in Law - perhaps those from Russell Group universities are more likely to be legal professionals? Nope. 40% of Law graduates from Manchester are "Legal associate professionals", as are 29% from Leeds, and 41% from Leeds. The
next largest percentage from each university are the 9% from both Manchester and Leeds who are "Sales, marketing and related associate professionals", and the 11% from Surrey who are "Legal professionals". So Surrey actually has 52% working in law in some capacity.
However, my favourite statistic is the percentage of final year students who agreed with the statement that "Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of the course". Manchester: 76%, Leeds 74%, Surrey: 91%.
There's lots of other interesting data. See The Uni Guide's data for Law at
University of Manchester,
University of Leeds and
University of Surrey.