Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, said, without the economic and cultural benefits of the immigrant community to this country over the decades—15% of our population is black, Asian and minority ethnic—this country, with 1% of the world’s population, would not be the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world.

This week is the Joint Economic and Trade Committee meeting between the UK and India. As chancellor of the University of Birmingham, president of the UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA) and co-chairman of the APPG for International Students, I welcome the recent Government support for international students through the reintroduction of the two-year post-graduation work visa—I helped to spearhead this in this House in 2007, it came into place in 2008, was taken away in 2012, and has now come back—and the three-year visa for PhD students. Will the Minister say whether the Government will consider the graduate route as part of an international graduate employability strategy, to be developed in collaboration with the education sector and employers, that provides clear guidance for UK employers on how to employ students via the graduate route?

I ask the UK Government please to exclude students from the net migration statistics. Many of us have requested that for years; all our competitor nations do it. Including them is very misleading, as research has shown that more than 95% of international students return after their studies for postgraduate work. For example, when people enter, they say that they are coming to study, but when they are asked on the way out, anybody who worked afterwards says that they were working. This creates an illusion of illegally overstaying international students. The lag between arriving and leaving also means that growing numbers of international students exporting UK education shows an increase in net migration.

Can the Government include India in the list of the 25 preferred countries for the UK tier 4 visa rules being relaxed? For example, China is now included in that list. Furthermore, international students generate business and tourist visas. Can the UK Government also reduce the visa fees for a two-year multiple entry business or tourist visa for Indians to the same level as that for the Chinese? Four years ago, this was reduced for China to £85, whereas it is still more than four times that for Indians. This reduction would help to increase the number of business and tourist visitors from India in general, of course.

In April 2015, we introduced exit checks at our borders. Are the Government using those checks to work out their immigration figures or do they still rely on the International Passenger Survey figures? The noble Lord, Lord Russell, spoke about data. In August last year, Iain Bell, the Deputy National Statistician at the Office for National Statistics, said that

“the weaknesses in the data were due partly to the International Passenger Survey—a poll of travellers at ports and airports around the UK, which is used to extrapolate wider migration patterns.”

The Financial Times stated:

“The UK’s official statistics agency has announced it is downgrading its estimate of the country’s net migration to the status of ‘experimental’ data after discovering ‘limitations’ in the way the figures are calculated”


using the IPS. Can the Minister address this?

Finally, many noble Lords have mentioned that coronavirus has placed a spotlight on social care and that it is often treated poorly compared to the NHS in terms of support. It is important that the sector is also not an afterthought when it comes to immigration. Social care should be treated as equal to the NHS regarding visa exceptions.