Immigration Rules (International Students)

John Pugh Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) on starting this important debate. I begin with a declaration of interest: I have benefited from international students very directly in the past few months. A Mexican postgraduate engineer called Alfredo helped me to analyse the complex business cases that the Department for Transport uses, and he was extraordinarily helpful. I also had a Swiss postgrad on an LSE scheme help me to expose some of the limitations of the northern powerhouse project and provide the office with useful chocolate, including proper Toblerone.

Debates such as this follow a customary pattern. The proposer adopts a cloak of virtue and expects the Government to do something, and the Government then point out all the practicalities, financial limitations and reasons why they cannot do what the proposer suggests. The proposer is normally the hero, and the Government are normally the villain—the Minister has to, in effect, act that part. However, there is a real opportunity for him to be the hero.

There is a Conservative Government with a progressive policy to attract international students. They lambast in press publicity their socialist predecessor for not doing enough, have a 10-year plan for international students and are aggressively building the skills base by attracting the brightest international talent. That Government are in Australia. There is equally—this is not a good example, because I might be prejudiced—a Liberal Government in Canada that are doing something rather similar.

Being sensible about it, I think we all agree that universities gain from a clear international dimension, with bright people from other countries contributing enormously to our academic culture and to important research areas where we do not have the research expertise ourselves. The world gains enormously from having an involvement with British universities, at no cost to us. It is a good thing, and nobody around the table would say anything different.

There appear to be only two problems, and one of them is within the Minister’s grasp to solve. Student numbers are cited as a problem, in terms of how they feature in net migration and add to the anxiety about immigration. I think most sensible people see that as purely a presentational or cosmetic problem. It is quite clear, from the polling evidence produced by the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), that the public do not see it that way at all when it is properly explained to them. The second worry, which is the more pertinent one as far as the Minister is concerned, is that study is actually used as a device for securing permanent access to the country.

The first problem is soluble. It is a non-problem. I understand concerns about how the Office for National Statistics does stats and so on, but frankly, when previous Governments were troubled by how accurate a reflection of unemployment the employment statistics were, they changed them. Within recent memory, the Government changed the assessment on child poverty because it and the way in which it was presented were wrong. The Government can change this.

The second problem, of study being used as a device to enter the country or stay permanently in the country, may not be a real problem—not if there is adequate quality control on HE. It looks from forthcoming legislation as if there may be less of that, but there was a clear clampdown on bogus colleges. I do not think we need to worry excessively about that. The issue may not be a problem because we have no good numbers on it. The hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East cited the IPPR report that refers to a secret report in the Home Office that says it is not a problem. Maybe the Minister will talk a little—of course he cannot—about this secret report. He is going to.

[The Minister for Immigration (Mr Robert Goodwill)]

It is so secret that not even I have seen it, if it exists.

[John Pugh]

Okay. I am grateful to hear that. The issue may not be a problem because when we think about it objectively, somebody who masters English, having not started out with English as their native tongue, and who has qualified in a good British university, may be precisely the sort of person the country needs.

None the less, I accept that, generally speaking, the Government, the public, the world distinguish between admission for study and admission for work, and they are two different things. The problem is that in this country we allow anxieties about the latter to completely screw up the former, if I can use that as parliamentary language, Mr Gray; I probably cannot.

[Mr James Gray (in the Chair)]

There is no rule against it.

[John Pugh]

Hence the conflict that rides through Government between the Home Office and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, who clearly has a different opinion. Hence we see the significance that higher education has for Brexit not only from the money point of view but because courses will fall over and research will simply not be done.

I am not going to volunteer an elegant solution to managing the position between admission for work and admission for study. It is a choice between whatever the Government want to do—summary rejection or complete inertia. However, I will make a simple point that most people would want to make. The Government can make life easy for themselves—they really can—by following business advice, public instinct and academic argument and publicly differentiate the student and the migrant.