Immigration Bill

Lord Tugendhat Excerpts

Monday 3rd March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I have Amendment 80 in this group. I was prompted to table it following the discussions to which I have been party about the importance of students to this country.

While entirely agreeing with the thrust of what has been said so far, I have concerns about Amendment 26. It would have the effect of excluding—or including—a particular group that would retain a right of appeal. The new Section 82(1) would allow appeals by individuals in certain circumstances, but the noble Lord’s amendment would allow all those to whom he has referred—essentially all students—to retain the right of appeal. Students and universities are an obvious, vocal and important cohort. They have a voice that others affected by Clause 11 do not have. There will be individuals who are substantially affected as individuals, over a range of circumstances and issues. I would be concerned about picking out a single group for whom to retain a right, without considering carefully what that would say to all those other people who will be affected by this clause. There may also be practicalities which I shall not go into.

The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said that many of our committees have said: “Please treat students not as economic migrants”. I do not doubt what he said but wonder whether we are being asked not to treat them as economic migrants or not to regard them as economic migrants. They may have slightly different meanings. However, I am absolutely convinced of the importance of the international links to which my noble friend Lord Maclennan referred. I am concerned about all the reputational issues for the UK that would flow from perceptions—we may be told that they are only perceptions but they are important—if we were thought not simply to accept students but to welcome them and seek for them to come here.

I am also concerned about what seems to be a lack of good marketing. We are told by the Government that students are welcome, but there is a problem in terms of promotion. Therefore, given that so much of the debate is actually about the number of immigrants and including students in total immigration figures, it would be right to pursue the issue regarding the number of students. We should seek not just to disaggregate the numbers, because I understand that that is done at the moment. However, that issue gets no coverage. We should be taking positive steps to make sure that it is understood how the numbers break down and that we do not prejudice ourselves by including student numbers in the total numbers and then finding that for whatever political reasons there is a target for reducing the total numbers, and the students get swept up in them.

I appreciate that there is the UN obligation and that the numbers are dealt with by the ONS and it is, in a sense, not up to the Government to publish separate figures. I know that those figures are there but they take a little seeking out and certainly do not get the promotion and exposure that they would if we were to have a debate based properly on numbers, rather than a debate that is based to a large extent on prejudices.

My Amendment 80, to which my noble friends Lord Clement-Jones, Lady Brinton and Lady Benjamin have put their names, would provide for an annual report by the Secretary of State on study-related immigration. I am sure that the amendment, which very much has amateur drafting, is riddled with technical flaws but its thrust is that we should be able to see annually,

“the number of applications to enter the United Kingdom on student visas”,

the number of applicants who actually come in on those visas, the number rejected, and an estimate of the number of people who have held a student visa who have left. We will, of course, be considering the issue of embarkation checks at the end of the Bill but one of the big holes in all the consideration of these issues is that we do not know who has gone. We also need comparative figures for other managed migration. We need this information in order to thoroughly understand what is going on. The lack of understanding is feeding a position that is entirely unhelpful.

The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, spoke to amendments regarding appeals and mentioned the proposal for an administrative review. I have an amendment on administrative reviews but it is not in this group and we will come to it on Wednesday.

[Lord Tugendhat (Con)]

My Lords, I very much agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said and I am delighted that my name should be attached to his amendment. I shall not therefore repeat his powerful arguments but should like to add just one further thought.

As everyone in this House knows, the United Kingdom is second only to the United States in terms of the number of universities that it has in the top group of the world’s universities, not just in absolute terms but in all kinds of important subject areas such as engineering; figures last week showed that Cambridge, Imperial College and Oxford were still in the very top group. That was as much as the rest of Europe put together was able to provide.

There are many reasons why British universities are in the top group of world universities but one is that there is a free market in talent that enables them to attract it from all over the world, not only in the students but in the teaching staff. To some extent, there is a chicken and egg factor here. They are great universities partly because they can attract talent from all over the world, and because they can attract that talent they remain very good universities.

There is a similarity between the university world and financial markets. Neither of them is purely national. Both are totally international with seamless connections across the world. Therefore, if you try to turn us into an island and cut us off from this stream of talent that is crossing the world, you will do great damage to British universities. It will not show up in the short term, as the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, just pointed out. These things take a long time to show through. But it will very seriously damage over the long term the ability of the greatest British universities to remain in the top group—and not only them. For 15 years, I was chancellor of the University of Bath, a university that was founded less than 50 years ago. This has nothing to do with me because the outstanding vice-chancellors that it has had deserve the credit, but in the past 20 years the University of Bath has moved from obscurity not only into the top group in the United Kingdom but now into a number of world league tables as well. That is because it has both a student body and a faculty that are drawn from all over the world. In fact the previous vice-chancellor was American. It has had people from the Far East, North America, South America and all kinds of places.

I beg Ministers to consider the fact that clauses such as this one that we are seeking to amend have a deleterious effect on the ability of British universities to perform adequately on the world stage. We do not have so many institutions, so many industries and so many spheres of our national life that are indubitably regarded as absolutely among the best in the world. Universities are one and it would be extraordinary to kick them in the shins.

[Lord Hope of Craighead]

My Lords, I endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, just said and what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said earlier. My background is that I was for 17 years chancellor of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Our experience has been that we are operating in a global market not only for teachers but for students—those coming to the university and those going out from the university to other countries to take on part-time study or study together with employment experience.

There are a number of aspects that I might very quickly mention one after the other. The first is the point that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, made about the cumulative effect of policies that have been building up over the years. One of the most injurious in our experience has been the inability of foreign students to stay on after they have completed their degree courses. I know that there is strong feeling in government that we have a policy about people who stay on who should not do so. These are people who in the previous system were able to remain here for a given period. They used that time to gain work experience in some of our leading companies. Together with their academic work, they took that back to their own countries, developed their own expertise and thereby maintained a continuing link not only with the universities but with the companies with which they worked. That has gone. We are not talking about that in this Bill, but it is against that background that this has become a much more serious issue. The noble Baroness made the same point. We have reached a point where we are losing contact and the competitive edge that we must maintain if our universities are to remain as competitive as they are in the world.

The second point is about revenue, which the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, made. Certainly, our experience when we were getting students from India and China was that they were paying substantial sums to come to the university, and we are losing that. I am told that there has been a 25% fall in students from these countries coming to Strathclyde for postgraduate degrees. That is a drop in numbers that is difficult to make up for in the market in which we work.

The other aspect is the exchange process whereby our students go away in the course of their studies for a year out. Because we are driving away international students from elsewhere, it is more difficult for us to get places for our students to go to.

The final point is that one of the essences of university is the ability of students to mix with each other, gain experience from what other people have done and make friends across the faculties and across the nations throughout the world. The opportunities for doing that will be diminished if we do not sustain our effort of attracting students from other countries from outside the EU who have so much to contribute. Therefore, I warmly endorse the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay.

I should add, in response to a point made by the noble Baroness, that I believe it is a very carefully crafted amendment because it is seeking to direct attention to a very particular category. Those are the categories described very precisely in the amendment, which is the point that I and, I suspect, the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, have addressed. It is a very particular category. It does not include language schools and all the other fringe elements, which might give rise to abuse. These are people who would be here for very good reasons, carefully monitored, and would take enormous benefits back to their own country if they were allowed to continue to come here.