Immigration: Overseas Students

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 17th November 2016 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

That this House takes note of the application of immigration policy to overseas students at United Kingdom universities and colleges.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, after our decision to leave the European Union, we are now setting out to woo the world. In the words of the Prime Minister at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, we are a “flexible, ambitious country” stepping up to “a new global role”.

Higher education and further education both incorporate a large number of world-leading courses and institutions. They have long-standing success and reputations overseas. They bring in a great deal of money in a growth market. They give us relationships across the world and over time that we can use for other purposes. They should be absolutely central to the Prime Minister’s ambition, but we are making a complete mess and losing market share. We need to sort that out together.

What each of us does affects the whole, as should be obvious to the Home Office from the effects of the random policy announcements at the Conservative Party conference. Some of the remedy, of course, is in the hands of universities, and the Home Office has my sympathy in having to deal with them. They move slowly, they tend to set the bar at the bottom—when faced with a range of performance they tend to set it at the lowest setting possible and then say, “Aren’t we good? We all do better than that”. They are very slow to engage with politicians. Despite having the support of the editor of the Times Higher Educational Supplement, I have had no response from anybody in academia, other than those I have approached myself, as to what policy changes the Government ought to make. They seem, judging from the pronouncements one comes across in the press and other media, to be mostly concerned with their own affairs and not really with what is happening to the rest of us. They do not appear to be as collaborative as they should be in this world. They market themselves individually overseas; the GREAT campaign, which succeeded in other areas of the economy, has really not made as much progress in knowledge, to my mind, as it should have.

However, it is the Home Office we have in front of us today, so most of my speech will concentrate on what I think it could do to improve things. My first question for my noble friend is, what is the problem? I do not mean that pejoratively; it is a bemused inquiry. No one I have spoken to in doing research for this debate has a clue as to what the Home Office thinks the problem is. What is the problem? Why is it a problem? What are its priorities? Nobody knows and it is really hard to collaborate with the Home Office and think of ways to help it while we help ourselves when we have no clue what it wants. It strikes me that the Home Office thinks that it does not need to communicate—it knows what the problems are, it is in charge of solving the problems and only it need do anything. It is a half-starved bulldog chained up outside in all weathers, waiting to bite anyone who tries to get in the front door. This is not true, particularly with Brexit: we are all in this together, we all have responsibility, particularly for immigration, since controlling immigration is clearly one of our objectives, post-Brexit.

All of us—the Government, employers, universities and individuals—have a shared responsibility, over time, to do something about the level of immigration. The Home Office is going to have plenty of trouble with employers on that; I wish more power to its elbow, but it should expect our collaboration and co-operation and it should involve us. Similarly, the Home Office has a responsibility for the economy, for trade, for employment and for the reputation of Britain as a whole, to which it must pay attention, rather than thinking it can make pronouncements and policies in total isolation.

Things have improved over the past few years. It is now possible for a university to have a dedicated officer at UKVI, paid for by the university—quite rightly so—to deal with problems as they arise and act as a conduit for questions. There is a very interesting pilot going on with Imperial College and some other universities to see what can be done to improve things further in return for privileges in the way that overseas students are dealt with. I thoroughly approve of that as a way of developing things, but much more needs to be done.

Fundamentally, as I have said, the Home Office needs to share its concerns. We are not, thank goodness, in the era of the Somme or Balaclava; it is not ours to do or die and not to reason why. We want things to be explained to us and to be allowed to contribute to decisions, to make them better and to make them things that we all own. I greatly encourage the Home Office to open up so that we can really know what the problem is and how we can set about solving it together. We have to wait, quite reasonably, for the Home Office to develop immigration policy generally. The post-study work route, which matters a lot when it comes to marketing university courses overseas, is fundamentally subservient to our overall, detailed immigration objectives. It has a lot of attractions as a method of immigration. By the time people become qualified, they have been with us a long time, we know them, they know us, and they have a loyalty and affection for us. They are a very good source of migration, if that is what we want and if it is where we want it. Once we have that policy I very much hope that post-study work visas will re-emerge as a very good way of bringing in whatever it is we want by way of immigration.

There is scope for a much more open, much deeper relationship between the Home Office and universities. Over the past six years or so the Government have created high-performing, highly accountable partners in universities, people who are used to working positively with the Home Office, who are greatly incentivised to work well with the Home Office and who can and should be relied on. However, they are not involved where they absolutely should be: designing systems, forms and websites. All these things make a great difference to how potential students perceive the UK. The connection with in-country officers is far too loose. This is true even for schools. Immigration to independent schools is pretty well trouble-free except for the behaviour of some in-country officers. It really does not seem to be integrated with the systems that the Home Office has. There needs to be much better connection there.

There needs to be fast correction of mistakes. Even obviously wrong decisions can take six months to set right. If it is a problem of finance then the Home Office should draw money from the university system to staff things properly. If a university notifies the Home Office that a particular student is sick and needs to defer their course for a year, the Home Office takes six months to register that fact and that six months is then deducted from a student’s right to study in the UK. That is not correct. We have just introduced the right to rent. Nothing has been done, as far as I can find out, to make that an easier policy for universities to navigate or to make it easier for them to help their students rent privately, as many of them have to. There does not appear to be any positive approach to the idea of students coming here at 14 or 16 and our taking them through to the end of a degree in a UK university, which is a growing part of the market.

There are lots of areas where there is scope for collaboration and continuous improvement in the way that the Home Office and universities work together to make us a better destination for overseas students. I would really like to see an “educated in Britain” database that records every student who has been the beneficiary of UK education, so that we can support them and they can support each other to create opportunities for trade and to help market UK education for future students.

The conference speech by the Home Secretary was a particular disappointment to me in the way it addressed universities. The idea of discrimination on quality, that there are courses so bad that they are fit only for putting our own children into debt, is not something that appeals to me or has any resonance overseas. I come back to my initial question: what is the problem to which this is an answer? There must be better ways of tackling it, if only we could be told what the problem is. I do not want to see, and I am sure that my noble friend does not want to see, the University of Huddersfield struck off the list as not being grand enough for overseas students. Why should we discriminate in that way? If overseas people want to study at our further education colleges—there are some wonderful, world-leading courses—or even if they just want to come here to study English, why should we put them off if we are in proper control of the consequences of our immigration policies?

That comes back to the old problem of the treatment of students as immigrants. Yesterday Jo Johnson restated to the APPG on International Students that there is no cap on student numbers; there is no cap on tier 2. Clearly, a group of people to whom that applies are not immigrants in the way that we usually think of them; nor do people around the country think of them as immigrants in the usual way. Their inclusion in the figures means that every time we do something to try to control immigration, which we will be doing pretty frequently, that is read overseas as an attack on overseas students.

We are completely muddying the waters. The problem is overstayers. We do not know how many overstayers there are. There are some good low estimates; there may be other estimates, but the fact that there are no data is down to the Home Office because it is not recording exits properly. Why should the Home Office’s failure be visited on universities? There is no good reason for it. It would be much better for everybody if the figures were separated and we could have a clear view of what is happening in the areas of immigration that we all care about.

The Home Office has demonstrated a great ability to be destructive to the reputation of higher education abroad. I believe that it could become a constructive partner and still achieve its objectives but that belief is based on my imagination as to what those objectives are. I wish it would. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. I think that we have made a very good job of celebrating the excellence of our universities and the importance to us of international students. I even found that I agreed with much that the noble Lord, Lord Green, said. It was a pleasant debate all round.

I have listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, over many years, so I had high expectations of her maiden speech and was in no way disappointed. I look forward to listening to her many times again.

I have also listened to Home Office Ministers’ speeches on many occasions, so I had low expectations. I was pretty certain that the Minister would be issued with a stick of candy-floss—sweet but very little substance—and so it turned out. It was comforting that she said such nice things about welcoming international students, but she absolutely did not say, “We, the Home Office, will be putting our backs into making sure we get lots more of them”. I am sad that she did not.

Motion agreed.