Immigration

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful for the opportunity to listen to the excellent speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine. I declare an interest; I run the Good Schools Guide. I shall talk mostly about students, therefore, but I start by saying how much I agree with many of the speeches that have been made today, including those by my noble friends Lord Ryder and Lord Newby, pointing out what a daft situation we have got ourselves into so quickly under our new Government. With this cap, we are going for the practice of central planning. We are doling out places in ones or twos. The people doing it have no understanding of the requirements of the various industries. It is all too evident to me, from education, how completely at sea they are when it comes to the real requirements of the industry. We will do ourselves immeasurable and long-term damage.

The City, the higher levels of academia, bits of the arts and other industries, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, pointed out, are not British businesses; they are international businesses that happen to be here. Once they are here, people come to them. If you want to go somewhere good to do something, you go where other people are already doing something good. If we destroy those businesses by refusing them the infusions of international expertise that they need, we will not get them back within a couple of generations. This is a daft way of trying to address the economic problems of this country. The difference between what the Home Office is doing and what my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer said yesterday is just astonishing. I very much hope that the Home Office will come to its senses.

Schools and colleges are a major, but rather funny, exporter; we do not export goods, we import our customers. This country has an excellent reputation for education. Education provides many jobs. We are a growing sector. We face fierce competition, not just from the established providers in America and Australia, but also from Europe, which is getting much better at providing international education. Indeed, people are starting international schools all around the world and some of them are extremely good. However, we are still succeeding in this market.

What we need and expect is strong support from the Government, but what we get is the UK Border Agency. The UK Border Agency has in its hands our reputation as providers of education. It is our front end. However, it is inefficient. It delays. It has a pettifogging attachment to incredibly complex and bureaucratic rules. All too often, there is hostility and unhelpfulness.

Let me give a few examples. I start with independent schools, because that is where most of my knowledge is. I am not aware that there has ever been an instance of a foreign pupil at an independent school becoming an illegal migrant—at least, not while they were at school—or turning into a terrorist threat. However, we are in a position in this country where, on the border of half term, 60 students who wish to come to independent schools are stuck abroad because they cannot get through the regulations. The bureaucracy and systems that are imposed on schools are extraordinary. Our officers overseas lack training and do not know the rules as they apply to schools. The limitations on CAS forms mean that, even if you are successful in selling a few more places to overseas students, those students cannot come, because the wait to be issued with more forms is something like five months. For what is all this bureaucracy and waste? What benefit does this bring to anybody? There is nothing but loss to our reputation and damage to our business. I cannot see a single benefit to it.

Further education also seems to be suffering in this system. Someone has dreamt up the crazy rule that you cannot study a course for more than six months unless it has been accredited by Ofqual. Does the Home Office not realise what Ofqual is? It exists just to deal with school qualifications in the context of the English state system. The rule means that you cannot come here to study such courses as air traffic control or predictive maintenance in the oil industry, which is a pretty important course in view of what has been going on in the Gulf and, indeed, what we are proposing to do in the deep North Sea. It is a serious course and as good as anything that is provided in a university, but it is not a university course, and it is not listed by Ofqual, which is not surprising because it is not what you do at school, so you cannot get a visa to come here to study it. If you want to start up something new, if you have a new idea for a course that you can sell to students internationally, how do you do it? Under the new rules, you cannot even begin to get the permissions you need to establish your business.

I really hope that we will see some sense brought into the system. I understand that the continual changes of rules have been a result of building up the points system and the difficulties the previous Government had in having to respond to every twitch of the Daily Mail by producing another regulation. I think we had nine changes of guidance in 14 months, which is not helpful in this area. I know we are dealing with a difficult situation, but we must develop this concept of the highly trusted sponsor. If you are going to trust someone, trust them. No one escapes from independent schools. They are locked down solid, so if an independent school that has achieved highly trusted sponsor status says, “We want that guy”, let him in. Why do you need to do anything else? As the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, said, rotary clubs are not exactly short of reputation. If they say, “We have ticked this student exchange”, why is there a need for any other bureaucracy? That principle also ought to apply to universities, further education colleges, both state and independent, and to those who have earned the status because they have so much to lose if they lose that status, as so much of their income is dependent on having it. They will protect it. You do not need all the bureaucracy and controls to go with it.

The Home Office must work with the Department for Education to develop a proper understanding of what education in this country is, how it works, its variety, its strength, what it can be trusted to do and all the opportunity there is for creating jobs, business and wealth in this country if the Immigration Service does not get in the way. The Immigration Service is being paid to do a job. It charges for this business. It ought, like a commercial company, to be crisp, efficient and fast in providing the services that we need. If we do not get that, we will get a lot of damage to an industry that means a lot to me and to this country.