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Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

Once a year, when I was in the private sector, I used to attend one of the remarkable futurology courses put on by the great Herman Kahn, who was a remarkable polymath. On one such occasion, I recall him saying that he thought that the United Kingdom did not need to have great concern about the post-industrial society because there were areas of skills and learning in which we were deeply impressive on a world scale and one of those was education. For a long time, I have been conscious of the campaign to get students to come to this country. I was directly involved as higher education Minister between 1983 and 1985 when full-cost fees for overseas students were introduced. The legislation for full-cost fees was deliberately ambiguously defined, but not quite enough use was made of that ambiguous definition by some of the higher education establishments. I also attended the Commonwealth education Ministers' conference in Nicosia in 1984, which frankly was a rerun of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, as far as the British Minister was concerned. Mr Ramphal, who was then the secretary-general of the Commonwealth Secretariat, saw an opportunity. Normally the Commonwealth education Ministers met every four years, but UNESCO was meeting in Sofia the following year. Mr Ramphal reckoned that most of the Commonwealth education Ministers would be there so he suggested that we should have a one-day follow-up and I was exposed to the problem in an extremely vivid way. I understand Governments’ 20-year balancing act between ensuring that recruitment to our higher education institutions was reinforced and their concern about individual controls. Hence, I understand the logic of the amendments which my noble friend Lady Hanham has tabled. However, for 24 years, I was a central London MP, in a constituency which had a large number of language schools. Are students in language schools, but not in higher education, covered by this legislation? I assume that they are because I see no wording to suggest that they are not, but it would be helpful to have that confirmed. In that regard, over that quarter of a century, I had a huge postbag of immigration cases. I was conscious how often Lunar House and the Home Office, on the one hand, and the language schools, on the other, totally lost track of students who had arrived at a language school and might well have disappeared into the larger community. I am sympathetic towards, and supportive of, what the Government seek to do. I also wholly understand the questions raised by my noble friend.