Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Maclennan of Rogart and Lord Lea of Crondall

Monday 3rd March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maclennan of Rogart (LD)]

My Lords, I wish to support the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, by recalling two anecdotes. He very forcefully and persuasively deployed the arguments about students from abroad, external to the European Union, coming to this country. One anecdote is about when I visited Tanzania with the late George Thomson and met Julius Nyerere. He had studied in a university in Britain and had translated Shakespeare’s plays into Swahili. The ties with Tanzania were greatly fostered by that personal encounter at a particularly difficult time when we faced apartheid in South Africa.

The second anecdote relates to a visit I paid to Hong Kong some years later when I met the director of development and housing, who had also been to a British university. When I inquired about who were the construction engineers developing various important developments in Hong Kong, virtually every single one of them was British. I think that reflects the truth of the general principle that we should encourage people from overseas to come to this country as students not only because of the money they pump into our education system, but also because of the long-standing ties that they foster when they go back to their own countries.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the first amendment in this group, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, for the following reasons. Each Bill introduced into Parliament has an impact assessment. I have considered the methodology of the impact assessment for this Bill. It refers to costs and benefits, but I think there is a fallacy built into the methodology. The section on employment and monetised benefits states:

“There may be additional employment opportunities for UK residents”.

This must be based on an extraordinarily narrow focus, even if it is not economic sense, to say that employment opportunities will be opened up for UK residents. It sounds like a bit of UKIP propaganda to me; I cannot see how the rationale for it works.

Why is this important? It is important because it is a long way from the sort of impact assessment to which the noble Lord, Lord Hannay and others, including the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, have alluded. If, for example, we were to see a catastrophic fall in the subcontinent, are we seriously suggesting that the impact assessment on UK plc national income over the next generation would be zero? Of course it would not be zero; it would be negative. It is unacceptable that the impact assessment can be framed as narrowly as this.

In this regard, I ask the Minister to do two things. One is to revisit the impact assessment and to at least have a go at the wider context. The analogy that crosses my mind is that 10 or 15 years ago we could have said that we did not need to spend any money on Heathrow Airport because aeroplanes could land there and if there were a few more in the next year that would be fine, failing to see that our market share in Europe, compared with Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt and Schiphol, would now be in a state of crisis, unable to serve all the places in China, for example, that can be served by these other airports.

Secondly, I ask the Minister to do a survey, and to put it in the Library, of the situation in other EU countries. We are talking about a distinct group, non-EU students coming into the EU, and although we control our own borders, at least to some extent—obviously not with the EU—we are not covered by a common external immigration policy. I am not suggesting that we should be. I am suggesting that we do a benchmark study. Australia, the United States and possibly Canada are the only countries that have been mentioned so far: the “white Commonwealth”, as it was once called. However, it is important to know what the practice is on this question of students in the other EU countries. Do they have to deal with the fearful rigmarole that we are confronted with here? Is the damage to Britain’s reputation part of the cost-benefit analysis? Of course it is not. I have great sympathy for the civil servants trying to do these cost-benefit analyses in so many fields nowadays. With HS2, can you actually look at the cluster effect on Manchester and Leeds and so on in the north of England? Possibly not, because it is very hard to do. It is very hard to quantify the cost benefits for that, and civil servants would get no extra brownie points for introducing, alongside key monetised benefits, things where it is difficult to monetise their value.

In conclusion, will the Minister agree with me, and with the spirit of what has been said by many noble Lords, that one cannot look at an impact assessment in the narrow terms on this rather thin piece of paper that I have here, which it is probably obligatory on Whitehall to use? Will he agree to look into the two matters that I have specifically asked about? This involves our world market share in so many areas, and that concerns the future of our country. Some might say that this is missing the point and that the point is to reduce the number of overseas students. I ask the Minister if it is outrageous to suggest that the policy is to reduce the number of overseas students, the rationale being that statistically they pose more potential danger to the country. We must spell this out. Before Report, there is scope for these matters to be teased out a lot more than they have been so far.