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Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

I thank the Minister for that extremely helpful and constructive response. I would be certainly be willing to withdraw my opposition to Clause 47 standing part, subject to the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, doing so, but I wish to stress a few issues further. The bogus college issue has been with us a long time; in this House, we have been round it for 10 years or more. There have to be other ways to get at it. It is relatively easy, when our missions abroad consider visas, to tell them which are the reliable further and higher education colleges and which are not. That is always raised by the Home Office in this context, and it is not half such a difficult problem as some others. We all wish to emphasise that effective co-ordination between the Home Office and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills is an important part of this process. One cannot stress too much that at the top end of our education market, dealing with visiting students sympathetically is important in a host of ways. In the scientific and medical fields, there is the contribution that makes to British scientific and medical excellence, and the extent to which that maintains an international scientific community. In the social sciences, we are talking about soft power and cultural diplomacy. I was sitting here thinking that among my own former students I now have only two Commissioners of the European Union, one head of state and a couple of deputy foreign ministers, but if I were to add the other members of my old department at the LSE we could come to a moderately decent number of politically influential people. It is important to maintain them as friends of the United Kingdom as they pass from one generation to another, so it matters how we treat them. Part of what we need to get across is that we will deal with them sympathetically and not treat them all as potential criminals and, while we all know the Home Office of old, we hope that in this respect the Home Office recognises that one has to keep some doors open as well as having one or two closed.