Immigration: Overseas Students

Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)]

I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for initiating this really important debate. I want to record a number of relevant interests in my commitment to universities, to teaching and to the importance of education.

If we were to recruit a group of cultural philistines and educational vandals, and send them away for a weekend to devise a policy that could do the most damage to this country in the shortest time, they would be hard pressed to come up with a better outcome than the policies and practices of the Government that we are debating today. They are incredible at this important time of global relationships and international economic competition, when for example in China there are now more graduates every year than in the whole of the European Union and Russia combined.

On a recent visit to Nigeria, I met a young businesswoman being supported by DfID. She was setting up her own business in northern Nigeria in the heart of Boko Haram territory and employing local people who are trying to create a decent economy in a large Commonwealth country. Her higher education was in India and China, not in the United Kingdom. This is the kind of world we live in today, yet we have devised a policy that discriminates against talented people and then deters them from coming to this country and making a connection with it. It damages our reputation and our economy—and it damages the pursuit of human knowledge in a way that we should be ashamed of.

I will reference specifically the Scottish dimension because, as I mentioned in your Lordships’ Chamber back in July, we established the Fresh Talent programme in Scotland with the enthusiastic support of the then Home Secretary, my noble friend Lord Blunkett. This was back in 2002 and it was brought in in 2004. It extended the post-study work visa to Scottish universities and then to Scottish colleges for up to two years as a precursor to what happened in the rest of the United Kingdom. There was no abuse of that system. It helped us turn round Scotland’s historic population decline and made it absolutely clear that Scotland was open for business, knowledge and talented people. It was an outstanding success, so much so that it was copied elsewhere in the UK—yet there are no Scottish universities or colleges involved in the pilot project on tier 4 visas that was established by the Government in July.

I asked the Government a number of questions after my initial Oral Question in your Lordships’ House. I am astonished to discover that the four universities—all from the south of England and from the higher-ranked universities of the United Kingdom—were consulted in advance, but no other universities or colleges were consulted in advance about the pilot project. The data on which the universities are supposed to have been chosen are secret and we cannot scrutinise them because of “commercial confidentiality”. Yet at least one Scottish university—the University of Edinburgh—has a minuscule number of visa refusals on first application, which is meant to be the criterion chosen for this. Colleagues in universities and colleges across the country will not believe that these four universities were chosen objectively unless the Government publish those data and review the universities that were chosen for the pilot. It is simply wrong that the north of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were missed out of that pilot project, and that should be reviewed, even at this late stage.

The other issue I want to mention today is our international soft power. We have debated in this Chamber on many occasions the importance of Britain’s soft power in the world: our role in the Commonwealth, the United Nations Security Council, the European Union and other international bodies and the connections that we have internationally, economically, educationally and culturally. Surely it has to be part of that soft power that we make these connections with people who come to study in this country—and not just those who go on to be world leaders, whom other noble Lords have mentioned, and I understand their point. In the now well over 30 years since I left university, I have met people who I studied with in business, academia and politics on almost every continent of the globe. They are working hard and making a success of themselves but they will retain a connection with the United Kingdom all their lives because of where they started their undergraduate or postgraduate education. It seems to me fundamentally at odds with our objectives as a peace-loving, internationalised nation that in future we would deter these individuals coming to this country and being part of that wide international network.

The fantastic American writer Maya Angelou, who sadly is no longer with us, once wrote:

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends”.

Surely in this day and age, at this time, when there is so much global uncertainty, insecurity and fear of the other, bringing people together, educating them together and sharing knowledge, research and teaching has to be one of our international goals. I urge the Government to treat this matter more seriously and to rethink their policies.