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.

Hillsborough

John Pugh Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

As a Merseyside MP and a Liverpool supporter, I thank the Home Secretary for what is almost the last chapter of an unbearably sad book. She must recognise that in this world, justice does not compensate for loss and grief. Apart from the judicial process, what more needs to be done to support the families and for closure?

[Mrs May]

Obviously, the next stage of the investigation and the CPS is important for the families, and I hope that they will continue to work with Bishop James Jones through the family forums, and on his work to hear about their experiences. That process is important for the families, and also for us, so that we ensure that we have heard their experiences and can take away from that any lessons that need to be learned and any action that the Government need to take.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Pugh Excerpts

Monday 6th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

The very reason why the last Government, in which I was Home Secretary, brought forward the Modern Slavery Act was to heighten the ability of our police and prosecutors to bring people to justice. There has been concern for many years, since before 2010, about the lack of prosecutions for modern slavery. The Act gives the police extra powers and has increased the sentences for people who commit this heinous crime. It will improve the ability of the law enforcement agencies to bring people to justice. That is why I look forward, under the Act, to seeing more of the perpetrators of these crimes brought to justice.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

5. What plans she has for future resourcing of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority; and if she will make a statement.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)]

Future levels of Government funding for all public bodies will be considered as part of the next spending review. We are committed to resourcing the Gangmasters Licensing Authority to ensure it can deliver on its purpose of protecting vulnerable and exploited workers.

[John Pugh]

The Minister will recognise that the GLA is massively important in combating people trafficking and illegal working. Can she guarantee that its workforce will not be reduced?

[Karen Bradley]

I know that the hon. Gentleman takes a great interest in the GLA, which I agree does excellent work. He will know that we committed in the Modern Slavery Act 2015 to a review of it, and that is now taking place as part of the wider cross-Government review of a single labour market enforcement agency.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Pugh Excerpts

Monday 5th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I am certainly happy for either I or the Immigration Minister to meet my right hon. Friend and representatives of the industry. We are aware of this issue, and we are looking to introduce an improved ability to identify people in lorries when they pass through our juxtaposed controls in Calais, but as my right hon. Friend has said, the problem is that those people are often getting into the lorries further afield. Also, even if we find them at Calais, the load is still considered to have been damaged and contaminated.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

2. What assessment she has made of the effect of city deals and other forms of devolution on the future of police commissioners.

[Mr Nicholas Brown (Newcastle upon Tyne East) (Lab)]

16. Whether her Department plans to devolve police oversight functions to city mayors outside London.

[Mr Speaker]

I have to say that I have received no request for the grouping of questions 2 and 16, but we will see what we can do if the Minister continues to smile nicely.

[John Pugh]

I thank the Minister for that response. Given the terms of the Manchester city deal, does he agree that police and crime commissioners could become surplus to requirements? Would not culling them result in useful savings?

[Mike Penning]

No; the police and crime commissioners are doing an excellent job. They bring accountability. The only bid to incorporate the PCC role at the moment is the bid from Manchester, and I look forward to seeing it working on the ground.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Pugh Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

The hon. Lady is referring, I assume, to the Northern Ireland example, where I know that that kind of recruitment was done. I would point out that although she and I share the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s desire to make the Metropolitan police force reflect better the community it serves across London, the situation is more complicated and variegated in London: London is a city of very many communities, not two. However, we are encouraging the Metropolitan police, working with it and the College of Policing, to use the parts of the Equality Act 2010 that allow a degree of flexibility to use mentoring and the language provisions that might be necessary for certain skills and to allow them to use the tipping point provisions if they have two candidates of equal merit to choose one from an under-represented community, so that they can achieve the commissioner’s ambition of making the force more representative.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

19. What assessment she has made of the relationship between recent trends in levels of crime and the cost to the public purse of the prison service.

[The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims (Damian Green)]

Police recorded crime figures and the independent crime survey for England and Wales both show that crime has fallen by more than 10% under this Government. Over the same period, the number of people in prison has increased for a number of reasons, including the police detecting more crimes and longer sentences for more serious offences. Between 2010 and 2013, we made almost £400 million in savings across prisons through efficiencies, benchmarking and the capacity management programme.

[John Pugh]

I thank the Minister for that answer, but at what point does the fall in crime get reflected in a substantial decrease in penal and prison costs?

[Damian Green]

As I have just said, we have been imprisoning more serious criminals and locking them up for longer and we have been making savings in the prison system through efficiency programmes, so we are meeting my hon. Friend’s challenge already. Many people would argue that at least one of the reasons for the reduction in crime is precisely that we are locking more criminals up and keeping them in prison for longer.

Hillsborough

John Pugh Excerpts

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

The hon. Gentleman has raised a very important point. As he presumably knows—because it has been in touch with him about this particular individual—the IPCC is aware of the issue, has identified Mervyn Jones as a person who is of interest to it, and is planning to interview him.

This issue has raised questions in my mind about the ability of police officers to retain documents that have been relevant to them in a particular role, and to take those documents away with them as if they were personal possessions. That has been highlighted not just in relation to the question of the pocket notebooks, but, on a slightly larger scale, in relation to the case of one person, Mervyn Jones, and I think that we need to look into it further.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I genuinely congratulate the Home Secretary on the thoroughness of her approach, but may I ask how many police notebooks that may prove relevant later were not recovered?

[Mrs May]

About 2,500 police notebooks have now been supplied to those conducting the investigations. I would encourage any officer out there who may have a notebook that is relevant and who has still not provided it to do so, because I think it important for all the notebooks to be made available.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Pugh Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

This issue is of concern for hon. Members on both sides of the House. The Government are looking at the most appropriate way for us to provide support and enhance the support we are already giving. As I said in answer to the right hon. Lady’s first question, I am working with the Foreign Secretary, and announcements will be made in due course. She wants an answer from me today, but I can assure her that she will have a response from the Government in advance of the House considering the Opposition motion on Wednesday.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

T4. My constituent, Rebecca Holmes, was murdered by an abusive ex-partner while under the protection of the police. We have waited two years for an Independent Police Complaints Commission report in order to learn the lessons. Can the Minister do anything to hurry such reports along, or at any rate to monitor how slowly they go?

[The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims (Damian Green)]

As my hon. Friend knows, the Government have given the IPCC extra resources and extra powers so it can carry out its work more efficiently. It is independent, so it would be inappropriate for me to comment on individual cases, but if he would like to send me more details, I will happily take up the general point with the IPCC.

Alcohol Strategy Consultation

John Pugh Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Browne]

I think that that is an offensive question. If not having a minimum unit price for alcohol meant that a Government were tacitly accepting that it was legitimate to be violent in the home, why did the previous Labour Government not introduce one? I just do not accept that. People have to make reasonable and rational decisions, and that is what we have done. We have not climbed down; we have put forward a package of measures that, as I have said, strikes the right balance between protecting people and reducing harm and protecting personal responsibility.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has been given a key role by our Government in assessing the efficacy of and evidence for public health measures. What did it say about unit pricing as part of the consultation?

[Mr Browne]

I do not have NICE’s specific representation to hand but, as I have said, the majority of respondents did not believe that we should go ahead with the 45p minimum unit price. As for the ban on multi-buy promotions, which we have rejected, the opinion was split about 50:50, but again the common concern—it was raised not just by institutions, but by ordinary people who want to live their lives without being micro-managed by the Government—was that moderate and sensible drinkers should not be unreasonably penalised, and I think they have a point.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Pugh Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

I observed no blips in our working together; I thought that it went very well indeed.

We have already agreed on how to deal with the issue raised by the right hon. and learned Lady. We will seek views on it in the summer. Lord Justice Leveson himself said that he was not able to devote enough time to considering media plurality matters in detail, and I think that we need to do so now. I think that if we are to provide the sort of broad policy framework that we need, we should seek views on those matters rather than engaging in further political discussion.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

T3. What assessment have the Government made of the impact of TV advertising on online gambling? What is the cumulative effect on the nation of a surfeit of Ray Winstone?

[The Minister of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Hugh Robertson)]

I am not sure we directly know the answer to that, but I will find out and write to my hon. Friend.

Hillsborough

John Pugh Excerpts

Monday 22nd October 2012 Commons Chamber

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I welcome the Home Secretary’s statement, praise the panel for its work and express my profound respect for the Hillsborough families.

Despite successive reports, it is unlikely that everyone will agree on every detail of the awful events of 15 April 1989. Each person, depending on how they were placed and why they were there, will have their own slightly different perspective, but I am sure that they would all agree on one thing. No one, whether supporter, player, steward, policeman, or council or FA official, whether partly responsible or utterly blameless, would not if they could go back in time do absolutely everything they could to prevent something like from this happening. That is because the victims, as we know now, were not ticketless or drunken or badly behaved, but those to whom all owed a duty of care. It simply should not have happened, and we now know that, for a whole range of different reasons, it could have been prevented from happening.

When the story was told, people saw different things and offered different explanations, and obviously some had a different agenda other than simply to get the facts out in the open. The South Yorkshire police, for example, were aware from the start that potential civil and criminal liability was an issue, and they got the lawyers in. What shocked me most reading the report was the tampering with the evidence of their own officers and their apparent complicity with misrepresentation in the media. The tampering was of a very formal kind; we have heard some horrific examples, but it was more institutional than that. They drew explicitly and openly on an unclear distinction that they made between opinion and fact, and then eliminated, with the knowledge of the West Midlands police and the assistance of their lawyers, a stream of inconvenient statements they had had from their own officers, including the plentiful references to “panic”, “chaos” and “disorganisation”. They were all eliminated as “just opinion”. They even changed evidence of “non-existent” radio communication to “hard to hear” radio communication. In other words, they engaged in an organised rewrite or editing of history. It was a clear institutional strategy. Admittedly, officers signed the amended scripts, but it would have been hard to insist on the re-inclusion of items that criticised their superiors and police performance, once they had been eliminated higher up—not exactly a smart career move.

I do not believe that the world is peopled by saints and sinners—as we have all learned, there are many shades of grey—and I dare say that some in South Yorkshire police thought they were doing the right thing. Many of us have met a lot of people involved on that day. I think, for example, of Norman Bettison, then chief constable for Merseyside, with whom many of us are acquainted in other contexts. Everyone needs a fair hearing, and there has to be a huge moral gulf between someone putting a good gloss on their own actions and those of their police force, and incriminating others, particularly those who can no longer defend themselves. That has to be reflected in any subsequent judgment.

Let us consider this: it took very little time for South Yorkshire police’s version of events to be established, broadcast and embedded in the public mind; it took 23 years for the families to do the same, and without their efforts the truth would be lost to history. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) said, that tells us something about this country. It tells us that there is a huge inequality, not of wealth, but of power—power to get a fair press, power to get information, power to get justice—and that raises big questions for Parliament. In this case, Parliament has been the last resort of the powerless, but we cannot be content with a world in which power is so badly and unequally distributed.

Liverpool people have a reputation for being stroppy—I do not know why—and for looking askance at the world. We do not need to go back many generations in any Liverpool family to come across an ingrained vein of grim Irish or Welsh fatalism and the belief that the world is not a fair place. The Hillsborough families have shown that that is not something we need put up with.