Immigration

Baroness Manningham-Buller Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manningham-Buller]

My Lords, first, I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, for initiating this debate. I want to declare a number of interests. First, I am a governor of the Wellcome Trust, which funds to the tune of about £600 million a year fantastic and extraordinary research, primarily in this country but also around the world to improve human health with real, therapeutic outcomes. Secondly, in that capacity, I am also a governor of the Sanger Institute, which mapped a third of the human genome and whose current difficulties with immigration rules were recently outlined very graphically in the Times; I shall say more about that anon. Thirdly, I am a vice-chair of the council of Imperial College, which is also affected by these current arrangements.

I start by saying, first, that I very much welcome the ring-fencing of the science budget in yesterday’s comprehensive spending review, but there is no point doing that and keeping the current arrangements on the senior cap. I will come on to describe what is happening there. Others, notably the noble Lord, Lord Ryder, have described that the UK is a world leader in science. I can say that because I am an arts graduate who barely knows what a molecule is but, in my time in these wonderful organisations that I am now associated with, I have been fantastically impressed by their skill and the scale of, and dedication to, what is undertaken.

Secondly, our universities need to be globally competitive. Universities elsewhere in the world are coming forward in leaps and bounds. There is a whole lot of further discussion on that to do with the report of the noble Lord, Lord Browne, but those universities and institutions need to be able to attract the brightest and the best students and academics, from wherever they come. That phrase, about the brightest and the best, was indeed used in the Government’s consultation paper. We need them for research—research which is making incredible discoveries every day—and to train the best in the next generation of students. Yet what we have at the moment is artificial protectionism that is, in some respects, actually preventing a brain drain in.

We are told that the knowledge economy is key. Wherever they come from, if we bar academics of the highest talent from coming here, they will be snapped up elsewhere in the world. Our key institutes are already suffering from the restrictions on skilled people; we have already heard about the area of the noble Lord, Lord Ryder. For example, the Sanger Institute, which is doing breathtaking work moving what we have learnt from the genome into therapeutic benefits for patients, has 17 people from outside the EU working there, only three of whom would now get in.

On Monday and Tuesday I, with other Wellcome governors, spent two fascinating days in Cambridge visiting a lot of institutes which are partly funded by the Wellcome Trust. I heard tales of some of the current research. I do not pretend to your Lordships that I understood it all, but I understood enough to recognise that there was some exceptional work going on. If I say that I heard from a PhD student who came from Belarus, a fellow who came from China and from others from around the globe, your Lordships will understand that I found this very exciting. In my past career, within my service, I worked only with British citizens and their children and grandchildren, but science attracts a range of different people from around the world. If we have a cap that makes it almost impossible for them to get here, we are doing not only them but our science and our economy grave damage.

Noble Lords might imagine that, in my bath at night, I am reading the new national security strategy. Your Lordships might wonder how I am going to connect that with today’s debate, but I shall read a bit of it out because it is absolutely pertinent to what we are discussing:

“We are a global leader in science and technology, medicine, creative industries, media and sport, and home to some of the top universities in the world. We continue to attract large flows of inward investment … Economic growth in the coming decades is likely to be driven by the world knowledge economy”—

and there is reference to our world-class universities. Investment does not mean only money coming in; it is people—students and academics.

I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us that the sentiment expressed elsewhere in this document—that our prosperity and security require us to retain open markets and resources, and be a strong advocate of free trade—applies also to the most skilled people who want at the moment to come here, who have been coming here for generations and who we need to continue to come here.

At the very least, if nothing else, in refining this blunt instrument, I hope that the Government may consider why, in the guidelines for why a person should come in, their previous earnings earn them double what their qualifications do. This is extremely foolish and dangerous.