Immigration Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, this Second Reading of the Immigration Bill is not taking place in a climate of public debate which is particularly propitious to the calm and balanced consideration of an extremely sensitive issue. Quite the contrary, there are screaming headlines in the tabloid press, paparazzi turning up at Luton Airport to interview any Romanian or Bulgarian on whom they can lay their hands and the two main parties being tempted into a race to the bottom with UKIP which they cannot hope, and should not want, to win. These are now the drivers of a debate which risks doing this country lasting economic harm and overwhelming our traditional values of tolerance and openness.

Amendments to the Bill were moved in the other place which would, if they had been adopted, have been contrary to our treaty-based international obligations. Fortunately, they were not so adopted, but senior Ministers did not oppose them. I am sure that this House’s consideration of the Bill will not go off down that dangerous road, and I pay tribute to the Minister who started the debate today on a note, which I thought was thoroughly admirable, of calm and cautious reflection. I just wish the substance of what he was introducing was a bit closer in conformity to the tone he used in introducing it.

I hope that in this debate, as we have already heard, people will be prepared to look more objectively and dispassionately at the arguments for, as well as those against, this country remaining reasonably, but not irresponsibly, open to immigration. There is a crying need for more research and an evidence-based approach to this issue, and for it to be looked at in a wider context than just that of our own national prism. About 18 months ago your Lordships’ EU Select Committee published a report on the EU’s general approach to migration and mobility, which highlighted not only the real threat from a rising tide of illegal immigration but also the need—if Europe is to compete effectively in the world of tomorrow—to continue to attract and admit skills from outside to supplement those of our ageing populations.

However, the main thrust of my intervention in this debate is not those broader issues, but rather the negative impact that some of the measures in this Bill could have on our higher education sector and on students coming to this country for full-time undergraduate or postgraduate education. In doing so, I declare an interest as a member of the council of the University of Kent. I begin, however, by giving credit to this Government for having taken action against the abuse of our immigration controls by dodgy language schools. That action was necessary and justified, even if the revelations of tonight’s “Panorama” programme show that there is still some way to go.

Other aspects of the Government’s immigration policy have not, however, been so benign. There is now a real threat from that policy, to what is by any calculation one of our largest and potentially most buoyant export industries: the provision of undergraduate and postgraduate education at our universities. I am sorry to repeat the figures, but I feel, particularly since I did not manage to recognise at all the one figure provided by the Minister when he opened the debate, that they are really alarming. The Higher Education Statistics Authority, whose figures for the academic year 2012-13 came out just last month, showed an overall drop of 0.9%—not huge I agree, but the first drop since the authority began setting figures in 1994—and a drop of 1% in students who were actually starting their education courses in the present year. The drop in postgraduates was 4.5%, and that is extremely important because it is a very profitable part of the universities’ offer. Figures for students coming here from India, as my noble friend Lord Bilimoria pointed out, have dropped by 49% in the last two years; from Pakistan by 21%; and from other non-EU countries by smaller, but still significant, figures.

This is all taking place at a time when our main international competitors are expanding their position in what is a rapidly growing market. The US figures for the same period are up 7.2%; the figures for Australia are up 6.9%. Those figures, surely, should be a wake-up call to the Government about their policies. Let us not forget that the negative aspects of this Bill have yet to come into play at all. This is what has happened on the basis of existing policies, and now we are piling Pelion upon Ossa. A number of the measures in this Bill are likely to make that trend worse, not better. They include the removal of the appeal rights for students and staff applying for further leave to remain; the introduction of a surcharge for access to NHS services; the requirement on private landlords to check the immigration status of their tenants; and the scope for the Government to further raise fees for visa and immigration services. That is quite a list of disincentives for anyone who is sitting there weighing up the relative merits of this country against others as a possible place to go for their higher education.

All this is completely unnecessary, if only the Government would heed the pleas of no less than four Select Committees of both Houses to stop treating full-time undergraduates and postgraduate students as economic migrants for public policy purposes. This is not a statistical problem. It is not a matter of a statistical quibble. The Minister addressed that aspect in earlier debates that we have had, but that is not the heart of the matter. The Government can, if they really wish, or feel obligated to do so, continue to include students in their submission of statistics to the United Nations or whoever it is they believe they are obligated to produce those statistics for, but they do not need—and that is a matter totally in our own hands—to treat these students as economic migrants for public policy purposes.

It is not even as if bona fide undergraduate and postgraduate students are the focus of the rather febrile public debate that is going on over immigration; they are not. If most people were asked whether such students, who contribute substantial sums to our economy and are actually creating jobs in higher education for our own citizens, are economic migrants, they would rightly be completely baffled. So why has the Government not simply stopped treating them as such?

There are serious questions to be answered here, and I hope that when the Minister comes to reply to the debate, and in Committee and on Report, we can hope for a more considered response from the Government than they have hitherto provided. Why cannot such students simply be excluded from the scope of this Bill? We are talking about a sector of the economy which is responsible for massive invisible exports—£10.2 billion in the year 2011-12, and more by now—and which is currently second in the world league table of a market that is growing rapidly. We do not have that many industries like that, frankly, and certainly not so many that we can lightly afford to further damage their prospects by what I accept are inadvertently and unintendedly conceived government policies.