Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill (Second sitting)

Tracey Crouch Excerpts

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 12th February 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Kate Green]

Q What would you suggest would be more useful in identifying the roles that need to be filled? How would we measure that?

Professor Dame Donna Kinnair: I think that we know what we need in this country. We know that we need nurses, so it might be that we are looking for that skill, as opposed to an arbitrary salary figure.

[Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)]

Q My colleague asked part of the question that I wanted to ask, regarding comments made this morning by the Migration Advisory Committee about EEA migrant workers making up a lower fraction of care assistants and NHS workers than the national average. Did you say that the percentage of nurses from the EEA is 10%?

Professor Dame Donna Kinnair: My understanding is that roughly 10% come from the EU.

[Tracey Crouch]

Q Is that 10% of the entire workforce?

Professor Dame Donna Kinnair: It is 10% of the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s register. We would be using the NMC register. I think that is right.

[Tracey Crouch]

It would be helpful if we could have some clarification.

Professor Dame Donna Kinnair: We can write to you with that clarification, but my understanding is that 10% of people on the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s register are from the EU.

[Tracey Crouch]

Q Do you know what percentage of your overall workforce is from overseas?

Professor Dame Donna Kinnair: I thought it was 17%, but I can write to you to clarify that.

[Tracey Crouch]

Q That would be enormously helpful. I have a very quick question for Universities UK. The Home Secretary said explicitly on Second Reading that there would be no cap on student numbers. Did that provide you with the reassurance you were looking for in terms of students?

Vivienne Stern: Up to a point. Ministers have been saying for many years that there is no cap on the number of students who can come to the UK under a tier 4 visa. That is not actually the problem. The things that have been standing in our way are features of the visa system that, frankly, make us uncompetitive compared with some of the other major destinations that international students choose to study in. A visa system that, for example, restricts the opportunity for international graduates to stay and work in the UK for a little bit post-graduation is, frankly, not that appealing when you compare it with the opportunities offered by Australia, Canada and the US.

There are other things the Government could do to make the system more welcoming. There have been some really quite positive signals in what Ministers have said recently about a willingness to look at the compliance system. We hear from prospective international students that they are put off by a feeling that the immigration system treats them with suspicion from the start, so we should look at things like credibility interviews and how they operate, decision making by entry clearance officers, and some of the compliance requirements on institutions, which require them to interact with international students in a way that can be rather off-putting.

All those things should be looked at, if for no other reason than that there are huge opportunities for the UK as one of the most popular destinations for international students. We are in a hugely privileged position, and at this particular moment in our national history we have the opportunity to open our doors to people at a very early stage in the development of their professional lives, to establish strong bonds and, in many cases, to leave a lasting legacy of affection for the UK. We could do with more of that, not less.

Education is also a hugely important source of export earnings for the UK. Although international students have value far beyond their financial or economic value to the UK, it is not trivial that this is an increasingly important export sector. The Government’s figures point to quite significant growth in our export earnings from education, which are now around £19 billion a year. We should be pursuing that opportunity, rather than tripping over our own feet. The new international education strategy announced in January is a great opportunity for the Government to get their policy aligned with their international ambitions. The visa system has to be part of that. There are some modest steps in the right direction, including in the White Paper, but we really think the Government should go a bit further than that.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

Q On that theme, I think I am right in saying there are around 450,000 international students in the UK. What proportion of those are from the EU?

Vivienne Stern: There are 442,000 students from all around the world, and just less than a third of those are from the EU. As a proportion of our total student population, that is around 6%. It is a source of significant concern that that enormous pool of talent will find it a bit more difficult to come to the UK after our departure from the European Union.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nic Dakin]

Q Finally, what are your members’ biggest worries at the moment in relation to this?

Matthew Fell: The single biggest area is time to adapt. It is not knowing exactly what new system they propose to jump into. They are completely crystal clear that free movement is coming to an end. The fear is whether a new system will be ready in time, with the promised reforms, streamlining and improvements. Will that be ready in time?

The vast majority of businesses in this country do not use the non-EU visa system at the moment. It is something in the order of only 30,000 firms in the country that currently use it and that tells me that it is a really quite restrictive, complex and burdensome system. If we are not ready with a new system that is ready to go from day one, without that clarity and without the time to transition into it, that, I think, is probably the biggest concern of all.

[Tracey Crouch]

Q You have spoken of the need to streamline and simplify the future immigration system. Following the question put by the Minister to the previous witnesses, did you manage to respond to the Law Commission’s consultation?

Matthew Fell: Here are a couple of examples around the sorts of streamlining we have in mind for the non-EU system right now. One of the requirements is around asking sponsor employers to provide evidence of their employers’ liability insurance. Nothing wrong with that per se, but you have to have a hard copy of that and today, most of those are issued digitally, so it is a headache. Another example of a day-to-day burden is that you are required to notify a change in salary for any individual. On those sorts of issues, for example, the check is required to make sure you clear the minimum salary threshold requirement, but there is still a requirement even if you raise an individual’s salary. You still have to notify. Again, when we are talking about simplifying and streamlining a system on a non-EU basis, those sorts of administrative headaches are the things that firms find unnecessarily complex.

[Tracey Crouch]

Q Those are good points, but did you respond to the Law Commission’s consultation, where you could make those points?

Matthew Fell: I would need to check, to be perfectly honest.

[Tracey Crouch]

Q The other thing you said in your evidence was around linking migration and labour market access to trade deal negotiations. Can you expand a little bit on that?

Matthew Fell: Many countries around the world have told us that that is quite important when they have negotiated trade agreements with other countries around the world. That is something they expect to be part of that overall trade negotiation. We have heard from India, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. They have all publicly said that if they are looking to strike trade agreements with the UK, ideally they would like to include migration as part of those talks on a future trade deal. When you look around the world and other trade agreements, it is frequently part of those discussions and part of the final deal and our sense was that, if, rightly, we want to seek to strike the most ambitious trade deals in many parts of the world, this is something that should be part of those conversations.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

Q Mr Fell, you have skirted round the issue a little bit. Putting aside the debate about the salary threshold, you spoke about how 30,000 firms are registered tier-2 sponsors. Is that right?

Matthew Fell: Correct, yes, it is of that order.