English Language Schools

Nick Boles Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I should first apologise for my croaky voice: I spent rather too much of yesterday afternoon shouting at the television.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Conor Burns) on what was, frankly, a very classy maiden speech. I hope that it will be the first of many conventions that he will overturn. I also declare an interest, in that I have spent, it seems, quite a lot of the past six months helping a young Israeli friend of mine try to navigate his way through the bureaucratic, Kafkaesque nightmare that is the process of applying for a tier 4 general student visa—and it is just that: a Kafkaesque nightmare.

Like my hon. Friend, I support the Government’s attempts to restrain excessive immigration, which has been such a problem in recent years, and in particular—he described this in more detail—the attempt to crack down on abuses by cowboy colleges and gangs that abuse illegal immigrants’ desire to get into this country. However, I believe that the previous Government’s approach was wholly misconceived. Instead of focusing ruthlessly on closing down the cowboy colleges that are colluding in fraud, they resorted to a process of ever-shifting bureaucratic meddling, in order to make the application process as complicated as possible.

I would like to give a specific example. I believe that I have a reasonable command of my mother tongue. I also have two degrees from moderately okay universities—one in this country and one in the United States—but it took me literally hours to help my friend fill out those forms and understand the supporting documentation that was required.

I will give hon. Members one example. Any student has to demonstrate—quite rightly—that they have enough funds to maintain themselves while they remain in the UK. The current requirement is for them to produce a bank statement showing that they have the funds in their bank account back home for 30 days. That is fair enough—I do not think that any of us would complain about that—but the bank statement has to be stamped by the bank, even though it is a statement from the bank. However, the statement does not have to be just stamped by the bank; it has to be signed by the bank manager. And that is not all: the statement also has to list the equivalent amounts in the account in sterling, and applicants can use only one website for that.

My hon. Friend has made the point that English is our greatest asset and our greatest competitive advantage. We must change the system, so I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will do what he can to help.