Student Visas

Debate between Jonathan Lord and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 16th June 2011 Westminster Hall

[Jonathan Lord (Woking) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Benton. Like other hon. Members, I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) on securing the debate, and on the excellent and measured speech with which he introduced it. I pay tribute to my hon. Friends who have spoken today, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) who explained the background and the wider issues at stake. We have had some excellent contributions from both sides of the Chamber.

I want to follow up some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Mr Wilson). In Woking, I have several private colleges with a good reputation—I do not have a publicly funded university—which make a real contribution to the life of the constituency and to their students. The Tante Marie cookery school is the largest independent cordon bleu cookery school in the UK. It was founded in 1954 by Iris Syrett, the distinguished cookery writer, and is now part-owned by Gordon Ramsay. It is an internationally renowned establishment and wants to be competitive with the world’s best cookery schools.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East, I have received feedback from legitimate private sector colleges, which believe that things are stacked against them. The rules are constantly changing, and that costs each college a lot of time and money. As my hon. Friend said, they must meet an extremely high bar to gain highly trusted sponsor status, and that includes proving that less than 2% of their overseas students drop out in the first third of the course. Most publicly funded colleges or universities would not meet that test, but they are not asked to fulfil any such criteria.

The bar is high, but my understanding and that of colleges is that, if they gain highly trusted sponsor status, their overseas students will not now be allowed to work while they are at the college, although a student studying almost exactly the same course at a publicly funded university or college would be allowed to work. That will make it very difficult for private colleges to compete with publicly funded universities, both internationally and in the UK, and to attract foreign students. A student’s ability to work during their studies has no effect on net migration, but removal of the right to work will have an impact on the number of genuine students who are interested in coming to the UK to study. If they cannot work while they are here, the UK will be a much less attractive and much more unaffordable place for them to come to study, especially as most other countries will allow them to work as well as study.

The Government’s intention is to reduce net migration and, as we have heard from my hon. Friends today, that is a laudable objective, which most people want their MPs to support and get a grip on. The best way to do that in the context of education, as we have heard from throughout the Chamber, is to crack down on the bogus colleges and to ensure that students leave when their course has finished. There is a clear difference between a student coming to the UK for the duration of a course, and someone migrating to the UK to live here. The former is undoubtedly beneficial to the UK, the student and our economy.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) said, what better way of spreading British values and the values of democracy, the rule of law and our cultural heritage with the rest of the world than through having genuine students come here to learn and live alongside British students in this wonderful country of ours.

I have long been an admirer of the Minister, whom, I believe, has one of the most difficult briefs in government. He approaches his task with customary tact, intelligence and verve. However, I must say that the potential unfairness of the new rules, and the way they discriminate against private colleges, even after they have achieved every level of quality assessment, will make life difficult for them. In my view, private colleges that meet all the quality criteria should have equal treatment with educational establishments in the public sector, and more equal treatment with similar colleges in other western democracies.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. However, in reality, students who are attracted to cookery schools such as the one he mentioned, and to most language schools, are not in competition with publicly funded universities. They are different courses and different groups of students, although I agree with him about the treatment that such colleges receive.

[Jonathan Lord]

I am grateful for that intervention. As I said earlier, there are many different private colleges in my constituency—I gave one interesting example of a college of which I am particularly proud. I believe that both publicly funded colleges and universities, and private colleges, have a great deal to contribute, and genuine students should be encouraged to come to the UK to study.

I tried to delineate the difference in the way that private colleges have to perform against different and difficult rules. Even when they receive the status of highly trusted sponsor, they find that other rules have been introduced and that, because of the lack of a level playing field, it is difficult for them to attract genuine foreign students to come to this country.

I have heard representations from some good private colleges that genuinely feel that they are going to be bankrupted. A lot of colleges will be bankrupted, but it will be the good and bad together. That cannot be fair to the colleges, to potential students, or to UK plc. I urge the Minister to look carefully at that issue and ensure that our private colleges—in particular the good ones that have highly trusted sponsor status—are treated properly and allowed to continue with the excellent work that they have done over many years for those foreign students who gain so much from coming to study in this country.