International Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Students (S&T Committee Report)

Earl of Kinnoull Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is an honour and a privilege to rise for the first time in your Lordships’ House. In the last weeks, I have been much touched by the warmth of Members of the House, many of whom have been generous of their time and canny in their advice. I would particularly like to cite the noble Lords, Lord Laming and Lord Aberdare.

I am also grateful for the staff of the House who have helped me in very many ways. I have discovered one thing—that there is finally something for which there is no iPad app: that is, of course, navigation around your Lordships’ House. Like every other new Peer I have been lost frequently but, always with good humour and a smile, put back on the right road. I dare say that for some moons to come, they will be doing the same.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and his committee on their report. Its clarity, its appealing logic and the good body of evidence it assembled in its recommendations were a cracking read. I would like to add a very few thoughts to it, because it was settled roughly a year ago.

My first thought can be summarised in the proposition that British international business needs the international STEM student product. Here I declare an interest: I have worked for more than 25 years in British international business and for a very large number of years in senior levels at the Hiscox insurance group, in which I declare a financial interest, as I do in Schroders plc. International business naturally likes STEM graduates. They are numerate, flexible-minded and well trained. If we like them, we like the international STEM graduates even more, because they bring with them the two additional dimensions of knowledge of another culture and, one hopes, linguistic skills. When put together in a team trying to win business internationally, having a balance in the availability of all of those features is something which often, in my experience, makes the difference between success and lack of success.

It has been marvellous for all the British international businesses to be able to participate in the annual milk rounds around the various universities to attract the best and the brightest and to try to sell our businesses and the excitement of doing things in our businesses to those students. Anything that reduces the availability of the pot of good students is something which is not in the interests of British international business. I put it to the Minister that, in consideration of the matters considered in this report, the interests of British international business should always be borne in mind.

I decided to do a little private update to see what it was like in the front line; it was a very limited exercise. I contacted the department of chemistry at Oxford. I should declare another interest in that in the 1980s, for four very happy years, including a year in research, I studied chemistry there. The department was very helpful and sent me an enormous lot of comment and figures, most of which I have sent straight on to the secretary of the committee in the hope that, when the committee returns to the subject—as I very much hope it will—it will be of some help to it.

I would like to bring to your Lordships’ attention three things that came out of that exercise. First, my own fiddling around with the statistics showed something pretty interesting to me about the chemistry department, which is that, roughly speaking, half the chemistry product at Oxford—both graduate and undergraduate—goes into business. The second thing I was not expecting at all, as it did not arise out of any of the questions I had asked. It came from an unsolicited email from Lucy Erickson, an international STEM graduate, who was my conduit at the department of chemistry. It was through her that I was contacting quite a large number of people. I think your Lordships should hear her words:

“I am an international alumna (Canadian) and graduated from Oxford in 2011. I’ve been working in Oxford since then and have seen many contemporaries struggle with visas.

I was lucky enough to get a Tier 1 Post-study Work Visa after my degree, which allowed me to stay and job hunt in the UK for two years.

However, after I finished, the post-study work visa was abolished. This had a huge negative effect on my colleagues who graduated after 2012—it was a real struggle for people to find sponsored work in just 6 months.

For example, two of my close friends were forced to leave the UK and move back to America when they were desperate to stay here. Those are just two examples but I know of many other people who were affected negatively by the change”.

I must say—slipping back on the British international business hat—that I find it very disappointing that we were not able to get access at least to try to attract those obviously high-potential graduates into our world.

British international business tends to operate on an annual recruitment basis. It is simply not practical to run induction and training programmes more than, say, once a year. If one is doing that, it takes several months to run a process from the opening of applications to the awarding of jobs. One is therefore looking, in the interests of British international business, for STEM students to be allowed to stay in the country for at least 15 months. I will come shortly to a practical suggestion about how that might be addressed.

I suppose that, net, that is slightly bad news. However, something that is, net, very good news came out of my mini-survey—and this is the third and final point on that. It was an email from the careers service team at Oxford University which states:

“While the lack of post study work opportunities has caused concern, the new ‘Tier 1 Graduate Entrepreneurship Visa (GEV)’ has enabled Oxford to endorse 40 international graduate students to stay in the UK with their new business ideas and the scheme has been very positive”.

I was not really aware of that scheme, but I am now. In further questioning, it turned out that more than half those 40 students were STEM students. When I looked at the high-level summaries of the business ideas, I was most impressed. However, there was a mild warning gong. It turned out that Oxford had the impression that only 135 GEVs have been issued so far. If that is the case, Oxford has a market share—if that is the right expression—of rather more than 25%, which suggests that the GEV is possibly not well enough understood or not well enough known about by a large number of other higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. I am coming on to a practical suggestion about how that should be looked into as a matter of urgency.

I realise that touching on anything to do with immigration at the moment is, at the very least, a warm potato, but I put it to the Minister that she would be able to instruct officials during the election break to look at the two issues I have raised and to see whether it would be possible to raise the post-study work time allowed to international STEM students from four months to the minimum of 15 months that I suggested, and how to do it; and to look at the GEV point I have made to see whether there is anything in that. Officials could be asked to report back by mid-June so that the report arrives absolutely fresh on the desk of the new government Minister, who would then be able to consider the findings and act accordingly and rapidly.