Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

The right hon. Lady needs to look at the statistics, as I have already highlighted. If she looks at the data from 2001-02, when there were 39,000 detections against a database of fewer than 1.4 million, all from convicted people, and compares that with the data from the last year, when over 5 million individuals, including hundreds of thousands of innocent people, were on the database, she will see that the number of detections had fallen to 32,500. Labour Members appear to be very casual with people’s liberties, although they claim they are not. They seem to assume that simply because someone is arrested for a crime, they are guilty. We take a different view. Labour Members are not prepared to look at the facts and the evidence.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

14. What estimate she has made of the potential cost to the economy of her planned changes to tier 4 visa requirements.

[The Minister for Immigration (Damian Green)]

The impact assessment estimated the net cost to the economy of the student and post-study work proposals to be £2.4 billion. There will be additional compensating benefits from reducing abuse, ensuring cohesion, and increasing public confidence in the immigration system, but it is not possible to quantify the impact of these changes.

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the Minister for his clear response. He refers to a cost of £2.4 billion. The best case scenario is a cost of £1 billion, and the worst case £3.5 billion, for a problem that the Home Affairs Committee struggled to find anybody, other than the Minister, to say was a really serious problem; even Migrationwatch UK was not that bothered. Given that we do not want to lose £2.5 billion from the economy, will he rethink these proposals?

[Damian Green]

It would be absurd to say that there are no problems with the student visa system. It represents two thirds of the amount of immigration into the system, and it has become the biggest single loophole in our immigration system. On the slightly arcane theology of impact assessments, my hon. Friend will know that some strange assumptions have to be made by Government economists. For instance, this has to be costed on the assumption that if migrant students are no longer able to work here as before, not a single one of the jobs that they vacate will be taken up by a UK citizen, particularly one who may be currently unemployed. If there is replacement, which is intuitively very obvious, then the cost to the economy will be significantly lower. That is why we have asked the Migration Advisory Committee to investigate this assumption, and we expect it to report in November.