Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones]

My Lords, I should like briefly to add to the comments made by both my noble friends, with whom I am in total agreement. Indeed, I very much welcome today’s debate. I declare an interest as chairman of the Council of the School of Pharmacy, University of London.

It is already very clear through this debate that the process and outcome of the consultation, impact assessment and change in the rules have been grossly unsatisfactory. Although it was rather strange, I suppose that the qualified welcome given by some institutions to the March statement by the Home Secretary and the attendant statement of intent was explained by the fact that many in higher education were expecting worse. However, that does not mean that any of them are by any manner of means in agreement with the current state of play.

I want to talk, in particular, about the closure of the post-study work route visa, on which I have asked quite a number of questions over the past two years. The Government’s response to the Home Affairs Select Committee and correspondence to me from the immigration ministry are interesting in that they show that the Minister and the Home Office seem to have greatly underestimated the importance of the post-study work aspect of coming to a United Kingdom university.

As vice-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary China Group, I have had a great deal of contact over the years with Chinese students in particular. I believe that some 80,000 to 100,000 students from China are here at any one time. The opportunity to undertake what is essentially an internship with a UK business after graduating, to prepare for a career back in China, has played a very important part in the decision by Chinese students to come here. In the response to the Home Affairs Select Committee report, the Minister said:

“We want to ensure students come for a limited period and to study not to work”.

In his letter to me of 27 July, the Minister put it rather differently:

“Tier 4 should be about coming to the UK to gain a high-quality education and not about finding a route to work in the UK through undertaking a course”.

However, that completely misunderstands the reason for the post-study work route visa. It is a route to having brief work experience here in the UK and thereafter to working long-term back in the home country with the skills acquired.

The tier 2 route visa will be granted only on a case-by-case basis. If we were able to unpack the responses to the consultation, which we are not, I am sure that a better solution could easily be found—certainly looking at the evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee—to tighten up the PSWR mechanism under tier 4. That would be much more satisfactory. As it is, it will make our higher education institutions much less attractive to overseas students. As we know, and as has been mentioned by all speakers so far, the impact assessment for the new rules came out extremely late in a very unsatisfactory fashion. That, as we also know, was commented on by the Merits Committee on two occasions, and we now know that some £3.5 billion gross of income and economic activity could be at risk as a result. That potentially has a huge impact on our education sector and it puts that sector considerably at risk on the basis of little evidence of abuse of the post-study work route visa.

It is right to say, as the Merits Committee does, that it is not clear from the impact assessment or the Explanatory Memorandum to the June statement how the findings from the consultation have fed into the development of the policy or the estimates of the costs and benefits of the changes. I think that that is an entirely uncontroversial statement in the light of what we have heard today. That is despite the statement in paragraph 8.1 of the statement of changes. As we know, the consultation was rushed through in only a month, which itself was grossly unsatisfactory and, sadly, these new rules have taken effect in those circumstances. It is vital that the new rules are kept under review and I hope that the Minister can give an undertaking that that will happen after a very short period of operation. It would have been better if these rules had not gone through but, on the basis that they have, I very much hope that the Minister can give an undertaking that such a review will take place.

The experience of Australia is an extremely salutary lesson in these circumstances. When the Immigration Rules were changed, as the Home Affairs Select Committee reported, there was a slump in applications from overseas to Australian universities, from which they are still recovering.

Finally, the Home Affairs Select Committee report, which is an extremely good document, said that the committee members were not persuaded that students are migrants. The Minister, in his reply to the report, said that he disagreed, claiming that the definition was long-standing under UN measures. That does not make it right. It is high time that rationality prevailed and that students are not regarded as migrants unless they are here for the longer term after graduating.

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for the opportunity to debate this Motion. A large number of points have been raised. I am eager to deal with the issues to which they give rise but clearly I shall have to deal with most of them in writing, as noble Lords have been quite wide-ranging.

The Motion before us deals with changes to tier 4 of the immigration system covering international students. The issue at hand is how the findings from the consultation have fed into the development of the policy and the estimates of the costs and benefits of the changes.

When the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, started, he told us about the importance of overseas students. He is, of course, quite right and I absolutely agree with him, but only in respect of genuine students who have come here to study at our world-class academic institutions. That is why we are devoting our attention particularly to the private education sector, where there is much abuse, although we are doing well to reduce it. However, I am at one with the noble Lord regarding universities. He will know that they enjoy considerable advantages under our policies. For example, we have introduced flexibility into universities on the English language requirements, on the ability to work and on the ability to bring in dependants.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, talked about loss of income from the UKBA. Although there will be a reduction in fees paid to the UKBA, the agency has made allowance for this in its business planning. I hope that he agrees that the UKBA exists to keep our borders secure and not just to turn over visa fees. He claimed the credit for the previous action to deal with bogus students but the previous Government only started that and left this Government with considerable work to do.

The noble Lord referred to the 35th report from your Lordships’ Merits Committee, which states that:

“The Committee regrets that it is not clear from the IA or the Explanatory Memorandum how the findings from the consultation have fed into the development of the policy or the estimates of the costs and benefits of the changes”.

Your Lordships will recall that the House debated the first set of changes to the student route on 16 May. At that time, the impact assessment for the student changes had not been published. However, the impact assessment for the changes to the student route was published when we made the second set of changes on 13 June. I reiterate my previous reassurance that we are quite clear that it is right and proper to provide the Merits Committee with the information necessary for it to do its job.

However, the issue having been raised, it would be remiss of me not to put this again in the context of the previous practice in this area. While it is generally accepted as good practice, there is no legal obligation for the UKBA to consult on changes to the Immigration Rules. In March 2010, the previous Government made significant changes to tier 4—the student route—without a formal public consultation. Despite taking the views of key partners, they did not publish any formal explanation of the findings. Similarly, in March 2006, following consultation, the previous Government published their policy for a points-based system but did not publish the 517 consultations that they received.

I am satisfied that this Government have gone to great lengths to seek the views of the public and of the sector, and to take account of these views in developing our final policy. On 23 November 2010, the Home Secretary informed Parliament that she intended to hold a public consultation on reforming the student visa system. This process began on 7 December, when the Home Secretary announced our proposals and the consultation paper was published. The consultation ran until 31 January 2011—shorter than a standard 12 weeks but that was in order to announce decisions at a time that would allow the sector and students to plan for the following academic year.

Our consultation received over 30,000 responses—10 times as many as the consultation on economic routes—and officials spoke to representatives of over 200 institutions during the consultation period. On 22 March, the Home Secretary made a full statement in the other place setting out the detail of the Government’s decisions, and the public reaction and data that had informed those decisions. On 31 March, we published a detailed statement of intent describing the full policy package and lay changes to the Immigration Rules to implement the first changes resulting from the consultation, which came into effect on 21 April. On 13 June, we lay the second set of changes to the Immigration Rules and published the impact assessment.

It is true that, like the previous Government, we have not published every consultation response. As I mentioned, there were over 30,000 responses online and over 200 longer written responses. We published a summary of the online responses to all questions asked and answered in the consultation. We also indicated the level of support in relation to every response. We felt that this was helpful information for Parliament and interested parties to have. The government code of practice on consultations states that:

“Following a consultation exercise, the Government should provide a summary of who responded to the consultation exercise and a summary of the views expressed … Consideration should be given to publishing the individual responses received”,

but, in this instance, the volume of responses made that impracticable.

The level of response demonstrates a high level of public engagement with the policy development processes. The changes that we have made to our final policy show that we have genuinely listened to and taken account of the views expressed. For example, we initially proposed raising the minimum level of English to an upper immediate level and required secure English language tests for all students. This received a clear, negative response from institutions, who indicated that pre-university pathway courses provided a vital route for international students to access our world-class universities.