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Operation Pathway

My Lords, I can only agree with the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan. He is absolutely correct. The bulk of students who come here have a real desire to learn. They wish to use what are probably some of the best educational establishments in the world, and it is absolutely right that we should try to provide such opportunities for them. Equally, we have to protect ourselves. Looking back, I do not think that we have been as good at that as we should have been, but I think that the things that we have put in place over the past two years are good and are protecting us. We can probably do even more and we are tweaking and slowly adjusting those measures to achieve that. However, it is absolutely right that we should encourage people to come here. We want real students who really want to learn, who can then go back to Pakistan and help that country. I believe that the education situation has been one of the key problems there in that it has allowed al-Qaeda and extremism to prosper. If we can do something about that, it will have been a marvellous thing to achieve. Perhaps I may go back to a figure that I quoted wrongly. I wish to clarify that 358,000 is the total number of students who came here in 2007. Of those, 15,000 to 20,000 were Pakistani.