Student Visas

Nadhim Zahawi Excerpts

Thursday 6th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)]

I shall attempt to take less than 10 minutes, Mr Deputy Speaker.

Ever since Erasmus came to study Greek at Cambridge 500 years ago, our universities have attracted the best and the brightest from around the world, but the world is changing. In the modern global marketplace, we have no God-given right to a competitive advantage in higher education. We have to fight for it.

As the Chairman of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee has said, there will be huge rewards for the British economy if we get this right. By 2020 the number of international students worldwide is set to grow to 7 million. Key strategic partners, such as Brazil and Saudi Arabia in the Gulf, have earmarked billions of dollars to spend on sending their students on scholarships abroad. This is a fast-growing market and if we want to win the global race we have to get serious about growing our market share.

We know that the competition is serious. Could there be any better example of the extraordinary lengths to which our rivals will go than the French Government’s recent decision to relax the ban on teaching in the English language at French universities? Let us be clear: even though we enjoy a commanding position in the market, over the past 10 years our market share has remained pretty flat. Over the same period, our two most obvious competitors after the United States—namely Australia and Canada—have recorded significant increases. What are they doing differently?

First, both countries present more attractive options for post-study work. Foreign students in Canada can work for up to three years after graduation, and in Australia they can work for up to two years, rising to three with a masters and four with a PhD. Crucially, they do not have to seek work with a Government-approved firm or on a Government-approved salary.

The other key difference is that both countries distinguish between the temporary student inflow and long-term migrants when devising their borders policy. Australia has learned the hard way why that makes sense. When student visa rules were tightened up in response to political pressure in 2010, the Australian higher education sector posted a 2.7 billion Australian dollar loss on goods and services that would otherwise have been purchased by overseas students. In the UK, we risk making the same mistake. In particular, the closure of the tier 1 post-study work route has broadcast the message around the world that foreign students are less welcome in the UK than they are in our competitor economies.

I believe that the perception of a policy is just as important as the policy itself. Even though it did not come to it, the prospect of legitimate students at London Metropolitan facing deportation was deeply damaging. We cannot expect the casual 17-year-old reader of the China Daily who is thinking about studying abroad to distinguish between London Metropolitan university and the University of London.

[Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making some valid points. Does he agree that one of the key things that must come out of this debate is a clear message to students in India, China and other emerging economies with a lot of growth that the UK is open, that there are no caps or limits, and that they can come here if they go to an accredited establishment, can speak English and have the funding?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I thank my hon. Friend, who is absolutely right that the message has to be that we are open for business. Indeed, the latest figures for 2010-11 and 2011-12 show that all the Russell group universities apart from three posted positive increases. There is some good news, but I hope that this debate will further inform the Government and the Home Office as to what else we can do to enhance the situation.

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

Although I agree with my hon. Friend that we should give the message that we are open to legitimate students, will he also concede that this route has been abused in the past and that, equally, we have to give a message that we will be robust with those people who intend to exploit our good will as a route into the country?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend is spot on in saying that we have to be robust and I will deal with that later. She is absolutely right to say that we have to carry the good will of the British people with us and demonstrate rigour in the immigration system and our border controls in order to be able to send a message to those areas that are crucial to our exports.

I want to return to the point that perception is reality and the example of the young student reading the China Daily. Fortunately, we know exactly what the problem is. With unprecedented unanimity, all five parliamentary Committees that have looked into this issue agree that the Government’s net migration target puts our borders policy on a collision course with our ambitions for higher education.

Political targets are an essential part of the democratic process. They tell the electorate what we are about and what our values are. However, targets are not an end in themselves, but a tool to measure the success of broader policy aims. The Government’s net migration target is about building an immigration system that works for Britain—one that delivers economic benefits while addressing long-standing public concerns about immigration. However, if we are trying to meet that target by discouraging a group who provide an obvious economic benefit, who are disproportionately less likely to settle here and who, of all migrant groups, attract the least public concern, something is wrong with the target.

I want immigration politics to be taken out of our higher education system. For that to happen, we must take international students out of the targets.

[Alok Sharma]

My hon. Friend is being very generous in giving way. Should we not be explaining to the public in more detail what the net migration figure is made up of and disaggregating it? We can debate whether student numbers should be taken out, but clearly we must explain each of the components, because that is not widely understood.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The disaggregation and further decimation of that information—

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

Dissemination.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Dissemination, I apologise. I will get my English right eventually. I only arrived here in 1978. I apologise to the hon. Gentleman.

[Chris Bryant]

It is a Latin word.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right.

We can do three things to solve this problem. First, we must continue to come down hard on immigration fraud. The Government are right to deal robustly with those who abuse the student route. The fact that we have closed down more than 500 bogus colleges since the election shows how easy it has been to exploit the student visa system in recent years. If we want to carry the public with us, it is vital to maintain public confidence in the integrity of our immigration system.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I understand the point that the hon. Gentleman is making about bogus colleges, but does he have sympathy for the students who applied to enter this country to study at those colleges and who have had a very bad time through no fault of their own because they were duped into a very bad system? The system has changed a bit, but should we not have a more humanitarian approach to those people who, after all, are victims?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Gentleman is right to point out that innocents get caught out in those situations. The best way to deal with the problem is to close down the colleges that are abusing the system and the students. Indeed, I spoke about London Metropolitan university in his constituency earlier and the perception that there is the forced deportation of legitimate students from this country.

Secondly, we must be more intelligent about where the risks and the opportunities lie for us. I hope that Ministers will listen to this point carefully. In targeting tier 4 visas, the UK Border Agency already distinguishes between high and low-risk students. There are face-to-face interviews for students who are considered to be high risk.

In my opinion, that should work the other way around and we should give the red-carpet treatment to the kind of students we want to attract to our country. For example, female students from the Gulf states are likely to have lower English language proficiency and are more likely to want to bring their spouses and children with them. If we want to see reform in the Gulf states, those are exactly the kind of students we need to attract. However, under the current rules, their dependants are obliged to return home every six months to renew their visa, and after 11 months the student must do the same. In Australia, Canada and America, dependants can apply for a visa that covers the whole study period. We do not need to rewrite the rule book; we just need to have more common sense and flexibility where our national interests are concerned.

Finally, we need a cross-party consensus to neutralise the political fallout. No Government want to be accused of fiddling the figures, particularly on a policy area as combustible as immigration. We need to present a united front when standing up for British economic interests. That is why I am sharing a platform with my colleagues from the Labour party on this motion.

I came into politics to get politics out of the way of British businesses that want to grow. Elsewhere in the economy, the Government have done great things to cut red tape and unnecessary bureaucracy. We must extend the same freedoms and opportunities to our higher education sector. I commend the motion to the House.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak after the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), just as it was to speak alongside him last September at the Conservative party conference, where we made the same points and received a good reception.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

The hon. Gentleman is always welcome.

[Paul Blomfield]

I am not sure that I will make a habit of it. We made the point then and we make it again today that there is much cross-party unity on this issue. The fact that the motion has been sponsored by Members from all three main parties is a sign of that. From my discussions with Government Members, I am sure that, were they not tied by the responsibilities of office, many more of them would be joining us in support of the motion.

The case that we are making today was perhaps most powerfully put in an article in the Financial Times in May 2012 under the headline, “Foreign students are key to UK prosperity”. The author wrote:

“Britain’s universities are a globally competitive export sector and well-placed to make a greater contribution to growth. With economic growth at a premium, the UK should be wary of artificially hobbling it.”

The article continued:

“Now that the government has clamped down on the problem of bogus colleges”—

from my perspective, the last Government did that too—

“there is scope to take legitimate students out of the annual migration targets… Indeed, that is what our main competitors in the global student market already do.”

I do not disagree with a word in the entire article and I do not think that any of my hon. Friends would. Who was the author? It was the hon. Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), who is now head of the No. 10 policy unit. I quote from that article not to score a debating point, but to demonstrate the breadth of support for the motion.

At the outset of the debate, it is worth emphasising that international students are important not just because of their financial contribution, but because they add to the intellectual vitality of our campuses; they are vital to the viability of many courses, particularly in the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths; they contribute to the cutting-edge research that gives the UK a unique edge in international markets; and they give UK students the chance to learn alongside people from every other major country, which is extraordinarily good preparation for the transnational environment in which our graduates will work. As has been pointed out, international students form relationships and a fondness for this country that will win us contracts and influence as they become leaders back home.

Those are huge advantages for Britain, but let us put them to one side and look at the hard-nosed economic case. International students bring £8 billion into the UK economy each year. Higher education is a major industry and a major export earner. Some people ask, “What about the costs?” Indeed, the Minister made that point on the all-party parliamentary university group at one point. I discussed it with the university of Sheffield, which said, “Fair point. We ought to look at that”, and it commissioned Oxford Economics to undertake the first ever independent cost-benefit analysis of the contribution of international students. As an independent study I expected it to be quite rigorous, although I did not realise how rigorous. Oxford Economics did not just look at health, education and use of public services; it went to the nth degree and looked at traffic congestion and every conceivable indirect cost. It concluded that the annual net benefit to our city’s economy is £120 million. That is worth about 6,000 much-needed jobs in the city, not just in universities but in restaurants, shops, transport, construction and more besides.

The Government have damaged our ability to recruit by including international students in net migration targets. That is not a statistical argument but a fundamental point because in doing so, they have put international students at the heart of the immigration debate. It is no good saying, as the Minister might later and the Home Office did this week in its response to the report by the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, that there is no cap on student numbers—[Interruption.] The Minister says from a sedentary position that there is not, but if the Government have a target for reducing immigration and they include international students in that, such a policy leads them to celebrate cutting the number of international students coming to the UK. Indeed, the Minister did just that a couple of weeks ago when the fall in net migration was announced by celebrating the drop in numbers of 56,000 international students year on year.

The Minister will point out that within those figures the number of university visas rose slightly while the real fall was in private college and further education student numbers, but that in itself should be a cause for worry not celebration. Not only are those students valuable in themselves, those courses are pathways into higher education and a fall in numbers is an indication of the problems we are storing up for the future. Conservative estimates suggest that some 40% of students going to universities in the UK go through those routes, and we should worry about that future impact.

On other occasions, the Government have argued that numbers are holding up, but as my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) clearly pointed out, holding up is not good enough. We do not want to stand still in a growing market, which the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills recognised will double by 2025. That is another £8 billion in export earnings for the UK and another 6,000 jobs in Sheffield, yet the Home Office is frustrating that ambition.

The hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) mentioned Brazil—one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Under their Science Without Borders programme, the Brazilian Government are spending $2 billion over four years on sending 100,000 of their brightest young people to study abroad at undergraduate and postgraduate level. They want them to go to the best universities in the world, and those are in the UK.

A group of 2,143 Brazilian students who wanted to come to the UK have been prevented by inflexible visa rules. They are high-achieving students who wanted to study undergraduate STEM courses, but they needed to improve their English before starting. Current rules prevent them from staying in the UK after completing an English language course, and they would have had to return to Brazil and reapply for a new visa before starting their courses. As a result of those rules and the Home Office’s refusal to change them, 1,100 of those students are now going to the US and 600 to Australia, where they are welcome to study English and stay on for their degree course. Of the original 2,143 students, only 43 are applying to come to the UK this September. The value to the country of that cohort was £66 million. That has been lost because of Home Office inflexibility, and with it, considerable good will.