---

Operation Pathway

I thank the Home Secretary for advance sight of her statement. She will be aware of the press reports that some of the arrests were weeks’ premature, and she said in her statement that the fact that the papers were inadvertently made public did not make any difference to the decision to carry out arrests, but that it simply changed the timing. Will she confirm that all those who were going to be arrested were arrested, and that all those who were arrested were going to be arrested within hours? Has any lasting damage been done as a result of Assistant Commissioner Quick’s indiscretion? On the issue of bogus colleges, will the Home Secretary tell us the latest state of play on the validation of colleges? Should validation be given a higher priority in the light of those arrests, and can she estimate how many students who are in this country attending, or perhaps not attending, have not been validated? On Pakistan, greater co-operation is welcome; the Home Secretary says that there are now greater checks on the qualifications of applicants. Can she give us more detail on what else is being done to improve checks on Pakistani nationals who come here to study and work? On the Security Industry Authority, the Home Secretary points out that there is a requirement for Criminal Records Bureau checks—those, of course, relate to UK crime. However, in these cases of foreign nationals, what steps are being taken to ensure criminal record checks in the country of origin? Surely that is the key point. We still cannot be sure that someone who is granted a student visa will leave when it expires; thanks to the last Conservative Government, we abolished exit checks. Can the Home Secretary say how effective exit checks are in the principal ports used particularly by Pakistani students? What estimate can she give on likely over-stayers, and how many Pakistani students who have come here in the past 10 years can definitely be said to have returned home? How many cannot be accounted for?