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Immigration (Work Permits)

I can strongly assure my hon. Friend that the proposal is not intended to be bureaucratic. Indeed, the reverse is true. We want to work in partnership—perhaps a new word for the Home Office in the context that we are considering—with large and small employers and universities, who ask people to come here to study and get much of their business from it, to administer and run the system in a non-bureaucratic way, thus resolving many of the problems of people needing to extend or change matters, sometimes using 80 different lists of migration routes into the country. I give my hon. Friend an absolute assurance that we will guard against a bureaucratic approach and work with large and small employers to make the system work effectively.