Higher Education (Student Visas)

Damian Green Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Immigration (Damian Green)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon) on securing the debate. I appreciate that the unusually large attendance for an Adjournment debate means that many Members have come to intervene, but unfortunately, as my hon. Friend has taken up two thirds of the time available, I am afraid I will not be able to take any interventions. He has raised many important points that I want to address in the brief time remaining.

First, let me put the consultation into perspective. Reforming the immigration system and reducing the level of immigration to a sustainable number is one of the Government’s big tasks. The uncontrolled immigration levels of the previous decade led to a loss of public confidence, strain on public services and an increase in the visibility of extremist politicians holding unpleasant views seeking to exploit the problem. We as a country need to reverse this, and we as a Government are doing just that.

We have made it clear that we will take a different approach. We will tighten up our system, stop abuse and support only the most beneficial immigrants. We set out our approach last year to economic migration, we have just finished a consultation on student migration, the specific subject of the debate, and we will consult on families and settlement. We have indicated that, through a more rigorous and controlled approach, we will see fewer non-EU migrants than in the past. Our goal is an improved system that commands the confidence of the public and serves our economic interests. We expect this to come through a system that shows a significant fall in net migration to the UK, from the hundreds of thousands annually that we have seen in recent years to tens of thousands over the course of this Parliament. To set that in perspective, in 2009 net migration was at nearly 200,000 and continued rising in the early part of 2010. For non-EEA migrants—that is, excluding British and EU citizens—it was around 184,000. My principal task is to reduce the numbers coming, increase the numbers leaving when their visas are up, and eliminate abuse in the system, one of the important points raised by my hon. Friend.

I am taking action to tighten our migration system across all entry routes for non-EEA-migrants—work, study and family—and to break the link between temporary routes and permanent settlement. Some of the measures will take effect in the short term. Others will set us on a long-term road to sustainable immigration, where Britain benefits economically and culturally from new skills and backgrounds, but in a context where people are at ease with the changes that they see around them.

On the student immigration system, the majority of non-EU immigrants are students. Our public consultation on the student visa system closed on 31 January and we are carefully considering the more than 30,000 responses that we received, before finalising our proposals.

Let me deal directly with some of the points made by my hon. Friend. The UK’s education system is world renowned. We remain the second most popular global destination of choice for the many thousands of higher education students who choose to study abroad each year. We want to encourage all those genuine students coming here to study at our world-class academic institutions. Genuine international students make an important financial contribution to the institutions that they attend, including our universities, where their continued contribution will be all the more important in the light of changes to the way in which those institutions are funded.

The brightest and the best students who have the greatest contribution to make to the UK will continue to be welcomed under the student route, but we remain concerned that not all those using the student route at present are genuine students whose main intention is to come to the UK to study. There are significant numbers of students whose contribution is less easily defined.

One of the interesting points that my hon. Friend makes, which has also been made to me by Professor Acton, on whose behalf he was speaking, is that we should stop counting students as immigrants—that they come, they study and they go, so they should not count. I am afraid to tell my hon. Friend that the definition of an immigrant is a UN definition. It is not under my control or under the control of the British Government. According to that definition, an immigrant is somebody who comes to stay in a country with the intention of staying for more than a year. That is the international definition.

Those who invite me to change the definition make a tempting case. I could at a stroke define away 60% of the immigration into the UK. I could, with the statistical stroke of a pen, define away the immigration problem, but I am programmed to resist temptation. In all seriousness, the idea that any Government could say, “We’ve solved the serious problem of immigration simply by redefining what immigrants are” would have no credibility. It would clearly be an absurd thing to do. We have to keep using the internationally agreed figures that are always used.

It is important to put the arguments in a proper statistical perspective. Students now represent the largest proportion of non-EU net migration. In 2009 the student route, including dependants, accounted for approximately 139,000 out of the total net migration figure of 184,000, which is 76% of total net migration. Recent Home Office research shows that 13% of those granted settlement in 2009 were originally admitted as students—23,000 grants of settlement. Further Home Office research shows that more than one fifth of those who came here as students in 2004 were still here five years later in 2009.

Another point that is absolutely essential to understanding the debate is that all too often there is an assumption that the vast majority of those students who come here do so as university students. Actually, 41% of the students who come here from abroad do so to study a course below degree level, and abuse is particularly common at those lower levels. As my hon. Friend admitted, 58 education providers have had their sponsor licences revoked since 31 March 2009, and the vast majority of them were privately funded further education colleges.

Last year, the post-study route, which my hon. Friend mentioned, allowed 38,000 foreign graduates to enter the UK labour market at a time when one in 10 UK graduates were unemployed in their first six months after graduating. Another common misconception is that because those highly skilled students are coming to read degrees and then take up skilled jobs in the work force, surely they are upskilling our general industrial output. In a survey of users of that system in which respondents were asked about their current employment status, of those in the tier 1 post-study work category—precisely those who are meant to be the brightest and the best doing skilled jobs—almost one fifth were unemployed and only half of those who were employed were in a skilled or highly skilled job.

It is too sweeping a statement to say that the system as it has worked up to now is not delivering highly skilled people into highly skilled jobs, because it is doing some of that, but it is also doing an awful lot of something else that I suspect Members on both sides of the House would not regard as desirable. As was mentioned in the interesting Home Affairs Committee hearing this morning, when the new system was introduced by the previous Government, there was such widespread abuse in three parts of the world that after a few months the whole system had to be suspended there: no student could be let in from parts of China, India and Nepal because of the absolutely widespread abuse that we saw.

I have already identified the private sector FE colleges that provide education below degree level as the area where we have the most worries. In the last year for which we have figures, those institutions admitted 91,000 students, so we are not talking about a small number of students on the periphery of a system that basically involves universities. We are talking about tens of thousands of students coming to institutions, the vast majority of which are not highly trusted sponsors under our system. That is why one of the key proposals in our consultation document is that only providers who are highly trusted sponsors will be able to offer courses below degree level.

Another absolutely key item on which we have consulted is a stricter accreditation system, which we need to create. The accreditation system that has grown up for those private sector colleges in recent years is clearly not adequate, and we are talking to those who regulate education, as well as looking at the way in which we regulate immigration routes, so that a new accreditation system for those institutions can be introduced which ensures our confidence in them. In the past few days, we have finished the consultation, and we will finalise our proposals over the coming weeks and, of course, announce our response to the House as soon as possible.

We want to create for student migration a strong framework that requires education providers to tighten and improve their selection and recruitment procedures. There will be a greater emphasis on quality, and we shall drive abuse out of the system. That will generate public confidence in the immigration system and ultimately be good for all the legitimate international students who are welcome to study here. Those changes to the student route are a vital building block in our overall immigration policy.