Visas: Student Visa Policy

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Valentine]

I declare that I am chief executive of London First, whose members include higher education institutions. My brief contribution today will follow the same theme as pursued by many who have already spoken.

I fully endorse the Government’s quest for an immigration policy that supports growth, addresses public concern and clamps down on bogus students. However, our actual policy is based on incomplete data and tends towards populism.

First, we have a net migration target, the paradox of which is that if fewer Brits retire to Spain and more Poles arrive to do our plumbing, we close our doors to international workers and students. Secondly, we base our policy on figures from the Office for National Statistics, which, frankly, has no idea how many students return home after studying in the UK, even though they make up about half our non-EU migrants. All this leaves international students as a random balancing number at the tail end of our immigration policy.

Given that we have four of the best universities in the world and that higher education is our eighth highest export, we are playing a risky game of economic roulette with the £5 billion that those students contribute. That is without adding the valuable diplomatic ties of their alumni—Bill Clinton, Indira Gandhi or Aung San Suu Kyi, to name a few from Oxford.

Encouraging figures regarding more applications from India and China were released by UCAS yesterday, but they are a small sample and should be set against the fuller data for the past two years. Indian and Pakistani students have fallen by about a quarter, and the Financial Times business education league table shows that MBA students have declined by about a fifth. Early research indicates that the policy of reducing post-study work options is a factor. I know of at least one major accountancy firm whose principal non-EU graduate intake is Indian, because it is expanding its offices in India and likes to train its graduates in London beforehand. Are we trying to hobble it? Our closest competitors, Australia and the USA, have no target to reduce international students, have more robust data, and are implementing or considering more flexible post-study work routes.

I understand that the Government wish to ensure the legitimacy and quality of migrants, but we should not create a climate where students feel that they are unwelcome because of the rhetoric around targets or because of unnecessary inflexibility. The fact is that we excel at higher education and make money exporting it. We should shout this from the rooftops and do more, not less.