Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Tugendhat and Lord Hope of Craighead

Monday 10th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tugendhat (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, said that the amendment enjoyed support from all quarters of the House. I speak as the Conservative sponsor of the amendment, and I am very happy to do so.

We have heard a number of powerful speeches and I think that I agree with every word that has been spoken. I particularly draw attention to a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, in his introduction when he said that he was not making a special plea for any given set of individuals. Rather, he was pleading on behalf of one of the most successful sectors of British life and of the British economy in order to enable it to continue to be one of the most successful, not only within this country but in international terms.

If I may say so, it is very important when the Minister answers that he should not treat this as being something directed towards a particular group of people who come to this country, as if we are conferring some favour on them. Rather, he should deal with the issue in the context of the impact that the Government’s proposals will have on one of the most successful sectors of British life and of the British economy. The ability to attract international students is both a means by which British universities excel and a measure by which others can see that they are excelling. To diminish in any way the free flow of talent to this country would be very damaging.

I should like to make one final point, because so much has been said that there is no point in repeating it. The Government should look at the beam in their own eye, if I may say so, on this issue. The Government understand very well that, when they make senior appointments to different institutions, they want to attract talent from all over the world. Indeed, they boast of their ability to do that and of their willingness to make appointments of non-Brits to high places in this country in a way that most other countries would not in the case of foreigners. They paid vast sums of money to attract a redoubtable Canadian to run the Bank of England—about four times what the president of the Federal Reserve gets, they were so anxious to attract his talents to this country. Another very talented Canadian—paid rather less, actually—is at the head of the Royal Mail. There are many other examples, I am happy to say, of talented people being attracted by the Government to contribute to the British economy.

The Government understand perfectly well the importance of attracting the best people to run British institutions, and they should be commended for their lack of chauvinism in that regard, but that is also true of universities. If universities cannot continue to attract the best talent from all over the world, that will seriously damage their ability to continue to contribute as much as they do to the British economy. As my noble friend Lord Cormack, said, those who stay after graduation are often the people who contribute the most to academic research, industrial start-ups or the businesses they build up. Those are all factors which I feel that the Government have overlooked in this rather ill-conceived measure.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I should like to say just a few words in support of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, based on my experience as chancellor of Strathclyde University for 17 years. Having spoken to many students of the kind we are talking about and having hosted alumni events overseas, I think that my experience has been very similar to that described by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, in that we have trained those students in our country and find them in positions of great influence in the countries to which they went after leaving.

I shall not repeat the points made so well by so many other noble Lords; I endorse all of them as background to what I should like to say. Perhaps the Minister will be kind enough to focus precisely on what the amendment is intended to do. If he reads its wording, he will see that it encompasses all the various things in Part 3: access to tenancies, bank accounts, driving licences and other services. Of course, among the services is what Clause 33 deals with: access to the health service. There is a difference between the Clause 33 matter, which I shall come back to in a moment, and the other services mentioned in the opening words of the amendment.

The difference is this. As I understood the Minister’s words in the earlier debate, the purpose of the other clauses is to flush out people who are not entitled to be here. It is to deal with people who are not legal migrants. We find that in Clauses 16(2), 35(2) and 42(1) all of which direct attention to people who require leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom but do not have it. I raise this point because the amendment is dealing with tier 2 and tier 4 visa holders—people who, because of the terms of their visas, are entitled to be here. Bearing in mind all the points that noble Lords have made, why is it necessary to subject tier 2 visa holders and tier 4 general visa holders to these restrictions? Why is it necessary for them to go through these hurdles to have access to, for example, a bank account? Why is it necessary to do that for driving licences?

As for Clause 33, that is a different point and I do not want to go over the debate that we had earlier this afternoon. However, while I did not intervene in that debate because the Minister was under great pressure from many people who were doing that very thing, there is one point that struck me in looking at Clause 33. It is that its wording, which is designed to confer a power on the Secretary of State to make provisions for charges to impose, begs so many questions. Who, for example, are the persons on whom the charge is to be imposed? Clause 33(1)(b) refers to,

“any description of such persons”,

but who are they and what is the intention of that provision? We then have all the various steps in subsection (3), including the points that other noble Lords drew attention to. With the greatest respect, my suggestion is that the noble Lord and those advising him should have a very careful look at the wording of Clause 33. I suspect that the debate which we had earlier, and which I am not going to rehearse, has flushed out some points of real concern about the breadth of the wording, what it is really intended to do and whether it is necessary to do what it is seeking.

Quite apart from that, there is the point that others have made: that to subject overseas students to this sort of extra charge is bound to have consequences. Two words struck me as I have been listening to the debate. One was “cumulative”, in the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. It is about the cumulative effect of all those measures that are made. The other was “perception”, because perception is fuelled by rumour. Figures have been put forward in this debate as to what students in this country, and perhaps overseas students, are thinking. What about all those who are wondering to which country they should come? They are the people whose perception should really worry us. There are also the rumour makers. Their rumours may not be based on accurate figures, which may have been the point that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, was making the last time that we spoke. However, the fact is that the rumours and the perception are there. The Government really have to face up to the fact that to pile on more cumulative items on to this package of things which are fuelling that perception is very ill advised. I hope that the Minister will explain to us why he believes it necessary to do that.

Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Tugendhat and Lord Hope of Craighead

Monday 3rd March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tugendhat (Con)]

My Lords, I very much agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said and I am delighted that my name should be attached to his amendment. I shall not therefore repeat his powerful arguments but should like to add just one further thought.

As everyone in this House knows, the United Kingdom is second only to the United States in terms of the number of universities that it has in the top group of the world’s universities, not just in absolute terms but in all kinds of important subject areas such as engineering; figures last week showed that Cambridge, Imperial College and Oxford were still in the very top group. That was as much as the rest of Europe put together was able to provide.

There are many reasons why British universities are in the top group of world universities but one is that there is a free market in talent that enables them to attract it from all over the world, not only in the students but in the teaching staff. To some extent, there is a chicken and egg factor here. They are great universities partly because they can attract talent from all over the world, and because they can attract that talent they remain very good universities.

There is a similarity between the university world and financial markets. Neither of them is purely national. Both are totally international with seamless connections across the world. Therefore, if you try to turn us into an island and cut us off from this stream of talent that is crossing the world, you will do great damage to British universities. It will not show up in the short term, as the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, just pointed out. These things take a long time to show through. But it will very seriously damage over the long term the ability of the greatest British universities to remain in the top group—and not only them. For 15 years, I was chancellor of the University of Bath, a university that was founded less than 50 years ago. This has nothing to do with me because the outstanding vice-chancellors that it has had deserve the credit, but in the past 20 years the University of Bath has moved from obscurity not only into the top group in the United Kingdom but now into a number of world league tables as well. That is because it has both a student body and a faculty that are drawn from all over the world. In fact the previous vice-chancellor was American. It has had people from the Far East, North America, South America and all kinds of places.

I beg Ministers to consider the fact that clauses such as this one that we are seeking to amend have a deleterious effect on the ability of British universities to perform adequately on the world stage. We do not have so many institutions, so many industries and so many spheres of our national life that are indubitably regarded as absolutely among the best in the world. Universities are one and it would be extraordinary to kick them in the shins.

[Lord Hope of Craighead]

My Lords, I endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, just said and what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said earlier. My background is that I was for 17 years chancellor of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Our experience has been that we are operating in a global market not only for teachers but for students—those coming to the university and those going out from the university to other countries to take on part-time study or study together with employment experience.

There are a number of aspects that I might very quickly mention one after the other. The first is the point that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, made about the cumulative effect of policies that have been building up over the years. One of the most injurious in our experience has been the inability of foreign students to stay on after they have completed their degree courses. I know that there is strong feeling in government that we have a policy about people who stay on who should not do so. These are people who in the previous system were able to remain here for a given period. They used that time to gain work experience in some of our leading companies. Together with their academic work, they took that back to their own countries, developed their own expertise and thereby maintained a continuing link not only with the universities but with the companies with which they worked. That has gone. We are not talking about that in this Bill, but it is against that background that this has become a much more serious issue. The noble Baroness made the same point. We have reached a point where we are losing contact and the competitive edge that we must maintain if our universities are to remain as competitive as they are in the world.

The second point is about revenue, which the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, made. Certainly, our experience when we were getting students from India and China was that they were paying substantial sums to come to the university, and we are losing that. I am told that there has been a 25% fall in students from these countries coming to Strathclyde for postgraduate degrees. That is a drop in numbers that is difficult to make up for in the market in which we work.

The other aspect is the exchange process whereby our students go away in the course of their studies for a year out. Because we are driving away international students from elsewhere, it is more difficult for us to get places for our students to go to.

The final point is that one of the essences of university is the ability of students to mix with each other, gain experience from what other people have done and make friends across the faculties and across the nations throughout the world. The opportunities for doing that will be diminished if we do not sustain our effort of attracting students from other countries from outside the EU who have so much to contribute. Therefore, I warmly endorse the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay.

I should add, in response to a point made by the noble Baroness, that I believe it is a very carefully crafted amendment because it is seeking to direct attention to a very particular category. Those are the categories described very precisely in the amendment, which is the point that I and, I suspect, the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, have addressed. It is a very particular category. It does not include language schools and all the other fringe elements, which might give rise to abuse. These are people who would be here for very good reasons, carefully monitored, and would take enormous benefits back to their own country if they were allowed to continue to come here.