Europe: Youth Mobility

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans on securing this debate. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, on his charming and heartfelt speech. I know that he will make a significant contribution to this House.

In principle, I welcome the concept of a youth mobility scheme. While most noble Lords in the Chamber are against the Government’s position, I am in the rather perverse position today of defending it, unless the Minister disappoints me later. Even within the last two or three years, we have undertaken bilateral arrangements and discussions with different countries including, indeed, with the EU on a multilateral basis for a youth mobility programme. As other noble Lords have said, in the last few years we have secured arrangements with various countries—Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand and Andorra—so we can do it. It is to be hoped that we can secure a scheme again.

Let me talk about the Turing scheme; some noble Lords are rather insouciant and dismissive of it. In 2023, more than 40,000 people benefited from the scheme across 474 successful applications. In 2022, there were 373 successful applications and more than 30,000 students involved. To come back to the point that the right reverend Prelate made about Erasmus+, I am afraid that he is seeing the glass half-empty, not half-full. Yes, we are not proficient in foreign languages, but the reason that Erasmus+ did not work for us post Brexit is that we are number two in the world for soft power—as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said—and people want to come to the UK. Over a seven-year period, the programme would have cost the UK a net £2 billion. On pure cost grounds, it was not feasible to continue that system.

In the same way, there are opportunities for collaboration, such as we see with the Horizon programme. Tunisia and Israel, for instance, are not in Horizon, but they have relationships with the European Union. This is a laudable aim, and I do not blame the British Chambers of Commerce and ABTA for making a strong point. I think, however, that your Lordships’ House needs to look at the wider political and economic context of this very difficult decision.

There is much criticism of the failure to include a youth mobility scheme in either the withdrawal agreement or the trade and co-operation agreement. With all due respect to noble Lords, the Government at that time had limited bandwidth; they had other pressing priorities and there was a lack of political willpower on both sides by the EU and United Kingdom. Many in your Lordships’ House did everything in their power to obstruct and thwart the UK’s formal legal exit from the EU over many months, which of course impacted negotiations. As someone who was closely involved as chief of staff to the Secretary of State for Brexit and worked closely with the Article 50 task force, I know that the Government had other issues: the financial settlement, the transition period, the Northern Ireland protocol, Cyprus and the sovereign bases, governance of the withdrawal agreement, and Gibraltar, to name the most important.

That brings me to the issue of citizens’ rights. For the more than 5 million EU citizens living in the United Kingdom, we have established in legislation and via the independent monitoring authority the most generous and benign immigration regime for non-citizens anywhere in the world. Indeed, in the next few months, the EU settlement scheme will migrate hundreds of thousands of those non-UK citizens from pre-settled to settled status as a result of a High Court case in 2022. That will enable them to have indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom, which is de facto citizenship—despite the UK being a third country. No such reciprocal EU-wide regime exists to protect and enhance the rights of British citizens in the European Union.

The UK was one of only three countries that, in 2004, imposed no transitional requirements in respect of the free movement directive. The significant numbers who moved to the UK thereafter were many more than were envisaged by either politicians or academics at the time. From 2021 to 2024, more than 4.5 million immigrants migrated to the UK. After five years, the vast majority will be granted indefinite leave to remain, meaning access to benefits, social housing and the NHS. Net migration last year was 728,000. It peaked in 2023, shamefully, at 906,000; no party had put that in their manifesto and it was not agreed by any electors.

I hope to explain that that is why the Government are rightly wary of any policy that might give rise to a return to de facto free movement. By 2032, in just seven years’ time, Britain’s population will have risen by 5 million and, in 22 years, by 9 million—a 13% rise in only about 25 years. The immigration system is, frankly, broken, but I will illustrate the many areas of dysfunction—the student visa scheme is a good example of short-termism and putting off difficult financial choices for another day.

A glut of student visas was issued in 2021 and onwards, motivated in many cases by the prospect of two years’ work on the graduate visa route. The explosion was driven by huge numbers of people from developing countries attending the lowest cost, least selective institutions, often on shorter postgraduate taught courses. Rather than selling education to future researchers, our universities are increasingly in the business of selling visas to delivery drivers.

Why did the Government do this? Short-termism, and it was my party that was in government, I accept that. The long freeze in tuition fees means that the real-terms value of the fees paid by domestic students has dropped by £2,800 since 2012 and, as the Migration Advisory Committee puts it, the sector has “an overreliance on immigration” because the higher fees charged to foreign students are what is keeping the sector from toppling over. While this is good for universities, the wages of those on the graduate route and their ability to switch to longer-term visas suggest that it is less good for the UK. Eventually, if we do not get a grip on this, we will see more pressure on public services, a fall in per capita GDP, a failure to train and upskill our domestic workforce and more welfare dependency—not good for the future of the country.

This is the economic context in which we are debating this very important issue today. It is not making a value judgment on whether travel and broadening the mind is generally a good thing; it is just being realistic and pragmatic about the challenges we are facing. That said, I welcome the position paper put forward by the EU Commission seeking a mandate from the Council of Ministers that was published in April last year. I think it is the right thing to do and it is right that we have a meaningful set of negotiations between the EU and the UK on the youth mobility scheme—and it is one which I have read with great care.

It is in many ways a sensible and pragmatic opening position, with its emphasis on limited in time mobility and the fulfilment of certain conditions, such as subsistence funding, health insurance and appropriate travel documents. For me and, no doubt, His Majesty’s Government, there are still major impediments before a deal can be secured. Being a third country is a shibboleth for the intransigent absolutists of the European Union and the EU Commission—but it cuts both ways. Professor Catherine Barnard, professor of EU law at Cambridge University, has described the proposal as “a defensive strategy”, as much to prevent the possibility of the UK striking more liberal and permissive youth mobility agreements with individual EU countries on a bilateral basis. Third country status is a two-way street. Why should the UK set aside healthcare surcharges for EU citizens when we have an NHS under huge pressure? Why should we forgo income from foreign students from the EU while charging enhanced fees to those young people from South Korea, India, South Africa, Canada and the United States? We should not accept that we have as an encumbrance single market indivisibility.

The youth mobility scheme is part of the Government’s mythical reset—but of solid details, red lines, bargaining points and strategic objectives there are thus far none. If, as the German ambassador has made clear, the EU sees a youth mobility scheme as a priority, the EU will need to de-escalate potential conflict, loosen the rigid negotiation guidelines and be more realistic—perhaps by giving ground on the length of the programme to, say, two years; on higher education fees; on fixing a cap or quota; agreeing a realistic visa cost; and explicitly ruling out the competence of the European Court of Justice.

To finish on a positive note, as we all have today, I will quote Oscar Wilde:

“Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices”.


For the avoidance of doubt, I support a programme that allows thousands of young people to travel, work, study, play sport and live among people of different backgrounds and cultures in Europe. It will undoubtedly benefit and enrich their lives and the wider community—I myself have travelled throughout Europe for over 40 years—but it must be done for our national benefit, in our long-term, sustainable national interest and in a pragmatic and realistic way. For that reason, I find myself, unusually, supporting the Government’s position.