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Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules

My Lords, I should like briefly to add to the comments made by both my noble friends, with whom I am in total agreement. Indeed, I very much welcome today’s debate. I declare an interest as chairman of the Council of the School of Pharmacy, University of London. It is already very clear through this debate that the process and outcome of the consultation, impact assessment and change in the rules have been grossly unsatisfactory. Although it was rather strange, I suppose that the qualified welcome given by some institutions to the March statement by the Home Secretary and the attendant statement of intent was explained by the fact that many in higher education were expecting worse. However, that does not mean that any of them are by any manner of means in agreement with the current state of play. I want to talk, in particular, about the closure of the post-study work route visa, on which I have asked quite a number of questions over the past two years. The Government’s response to the Home Affairs Select Committee and correspondence to me from the immigration ministry are interesting in that they show that the Minister and the Home Office seem to have greatly underestimated the importance of the post-study work aspect of coming to a United Kingdom university. As vice-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary China Group, I have had a great deal of contact over the years with Chinese students in particular. I believe that some 80,000 to 100,000 students from China are here at any one time. The opportunity to undertake what is essentially an internship with a UK business after graduating, to prepare for a career back in China, has played a very important part in the decision by Chinese students to come here. In the response to the Home Affairs Select Committee report, the Minister said: "““We want to ensure students come for a limited period and to study not to work””." In his letter to me of 27 July, the Minister put it rather differently: "““Tier 4 should be about coming to the UK to gain a high-quality education and not about finding a route to work in the UK through undertaking a course””." However, that completely misunderstands the reason for the post-study work route visa. It is a route to having brief work experience here in the UK and thereafter to working long-term back in the home country with the skills acquired. The tier 2 route visa will be granted only on a case-by-case basis. If we were able to unpack the responses to the consultation, which we are not, I am sure that a better solution could easily be found—certainly looking at the evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee—to tighten up the PSWR mechanism under tier 4. That would be much more satisfactory. As it is, it will make our higher education institutions much less attractive to overseas students. As we know, and as has been mentioned by all speakers so far, the impact assessment for the new rules came out extremely late in a very unsatisfactory fashion. That, as we also know, was commented on by the Merits Committee on two occasions, and we now know that some £3.5 billion gross of income and economic activity could be at risk as a result. That potentially has a huge impact on our education sector and it puts that sector considerably at risk on the basis of little evidence of abuse of the post-study work route visa. It is right to say, as the Merits Committee does, that it is not clear from the impact assessment or the Explanatory Memorandum to the June statement how the findings from the consultation have fed into the development of the policy or the estimates of the costs and benefits of the changes. I think that that is an entirely uncontroversial statement in the light of what we have heard today. That is despite the statement in paragraph 8.1 of the statement of changes. As we know, the consultation was rushed through in only a month, which itself was grossly unsatisfactory and, sadly, these new rules have taken effect in those circumstances. It is vital that the new rules are kept under review and I hope that the Minister can give an undertaking that that will happen after a very short period of operation. It would have been better if these rules had not gone through but, on the basis that they have, I very much hope that the Minister can give an undertaking that such a review will take place. The experience of Australia is an extremely salutary lesson in these circumstances. When the Immigration Rules were changed, as the Home Affairs Select Committee reported, there was a slump in applications from overseas to Australian universities, from which they are still recovering. Finally, the Home Affairs Select Committee report, which is an extremely good document, said that the committee members were not persuaded that students are migrants. The Minister, in his reply to the report, said that he disagreed, claiming that the definition was long-standing under UN measures. That does not make it right. It is high time that rationality prevailed and that students are not regarded as migrants unless they are here for the longer term after graduating.