Visas: Points-based System

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I declare an interest as executive director of the Association of Universities in the East of England and, through that role, as an employee of the University of East Anglia. This country has a proud history of over 800 years of intellectual rigour and academic excellence in its higher education institutions. Even in medieval times, there was a free flow between universities across Europe, with the best academics moving around to teach, research and learn from others elsewhere. The horizons of our universities today are truly international and the breadth of knowledge being shared is quite extraordinary. Many noble Lords in this House have contributed to this global exchange.

This is not just about Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial, proud as we are of their international rankings. Every university I have worked with has groundbreaking research or teaching projects in which they are collaborating with universities overseas or are hosting exceptional researchers to strengthen the UK’s knowledge base and, really importantly, given the Government’s focus on innovation and growth, to provide the innovation that our economy needs to make it grow over the next few years. Our universities are genuinely global businesses, generating about £8 billion of foreign exchange earnings for the UK every year. They have globalised workforces. This country needs the brightest and the best, not least because within the UK we undersupply in several critical areas, for example in mathematics and engineering.

There are structural difficulties with the new points-based system that may prove to be catastrophic to our universities. The closure of tier 1 general means that universities will now have to use tier 2 general to try to recruit academics and researchers from overseas, which will place additional pressure on this category. As an aside, the planned closure of tier 1 post-study work, which is currently under consideration as part of the consultation on the student immigration system, has implications for the recruitment of international graduates of UK universities into research and academic posts on completion of their studies in the UK. This route has been widely used for the recruitment of postdoctoral staff and others into universities. The closure of this route will further restrict the progression and recruitment of highly skilled academics into our universities.

I echo the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Parekh. Further problems relate to the 21,700 annual limit—1,000 for tier 1 exceptional talent visas and 20,700 for tier 2 visas—as it applies only to 2011-12. Draconian as this 20 per cent reduction is, I understand that the limit is likely to be reduced further for 2012-13 to facilitate reductions in net migration, so the future availability of visas will definitely be an ongoing issue. I believe that the creation of the tier 1 exceptional talent route for people in the sciences, academia and arts is a welcome recognition of the arguments put forward by Universities UK and other organisations about the importance of international mobility to higher education and research. However, the arbitrary cap of 1,000 visas a year for this route is very peculiar as talent is rather difficult to quantify and discriminate between on a numerical basis. It is also unclear exactly how exceptional talent will be judged and what steps will be taken to ensure that emerging as well as established talent is recognised. Who will judge? I hope it is not UK Border Agency staff. Their record on understanding even the basics of our higher education system has, as we have heard today, caused real problems in recent years.

There are also practical problems with the UK Border Agency’s belief that visa demands nationally remain relatively steady month by month and that high demands in certain sectors at given times will be balanced out by lower demand in others. This is absolutely not true of the higher education sector, which is inevitably highly cyclical, with the vast majority of posts starting at the beginning of the academic year in the autumn. I cannot see this being balanced out elsewhere.

In addition, the quota now given to universities and research institutes under the points-based system is damagingly tight. For example, under the new quota system the University of Bedfordshire, which has over 1,000 staff, makes a contribution to its local economy of £270 million a year, and is perhaps not the top of most people’s thoughts about an intensive research university, was allocated a quota of two. This was used up in employing two outstanding professors in the first month of the year.

My own employer, the University of East Anglia, and across the Norwich Research Park, is experiencing the negative impact that this is having on key appointments whereby first-rate brains from outside the EU are discouraged from applying or have to be passed over. Appointment strategies have to be reshaped in a manner dictated not by research priorities but by this narrowing of the range and quality available in the UK. The negative effect on scientific progress and academic collaboration is compounded by the squeeze on short-term academic visits. Posts and academic fields affected range across the disciplines, from English literature and Japanese culture at one end of the spectrum to critical scientific areas at the other, including plant science, on which the Norwich Research Park has been the academic place of choice for the world’s foremost specialists.

As a result of this ill thought through visa system, the best academics are likely to have job offers and opportunities available to them in other parts of the world. Will they go elsewhere due to delays in obtaining a visa to come to the UK to take up a post? We rightly worry about the brain drain from the UK, but these proposals will discourage the best academics from coming here and might turn our higher education sector into a backwater instead of being globally competitive.

The proposed structure of the new system might mean that employers suffer delays and uncertainties in the issuing of certificates of sponsorship for visas. I end by quoting from correspondence that I have had with Dr Oren Scherman, the Harrison-Meldola Prize winner for 2009 and an inorganic chemist working in supramolecular polymers, a highly specialised area of research excellence. He highlights how the nuts and bolts of the visa system seem to be designed to fail applicants at every turn, even when their finance is provided by EU funding specifically because they are exceptional overseas researchers. He says:

“The first application for a Certificate of Sponsorship by the University to the UK Border Agency at the Home Office appeared to take longer than usual and then the visa application by the post-doc was denied because apparently the wording on the letter confirming maintenance from the university was incorrect at that time although it had been acceptable for another candidate a few months earlier. We were told that the rules for visas had changed between the University application to the Home Office and the completion of the post-doc’s visa application in India. We then had to go through the process of rewriting the support letter and applying to the Home Office and the candidate applying for his visa, a second time. This points-based system seems very complex and the delays we incurred caused the Post-Doc to wait in India, unpaid, for at least four months, during which time he almost took up the offer of another position in India. I had to persuade him then that we were really keen on employing him in Cambridge although the delays must have suggested otherwise”.

I thank the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for instigating this debate. I hope that the Government can review the whole system as a matter of urgency, because it is clearly ludicrous, and for it to be easier to recruit professional footballers from overseas than the professors and researchers that our country so badly needs makes this country a laughing stock.