Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

I am sorry to have arrived late in Committee. It was due to what an Italian correspondent once descried to me in a letter as ““the exigencies of the epoch””, which he spelt without an ““h””. Those exigencies also applied when I spoke at Second Reading of the Bill, when I had left the keys of my locker at home and therefore was somewhat strained, in terms of speaking with any relevance to the matters in front of us. I shall be very brief, but if there is a tinge of Second Reading to my remarks, I hope I shall, in the circumstances, be excused because of my previous omission. I think I am right in saying that I am the only Member of the Committee who served as Higher Education Minister. At that stage, we were seeking to increase the number of overseas students coming to this country. It was a fact that 24 heads of state—in what was a rather smaller United Nations in those days—had been educated in the United Kingdom and there is no question that people coming here to be educated has greatly benefited British trade thereafter. However, I implemented regulations introduced by my predecessor that overseas students had to pay full costs. It could be argued that our ambition and that provision were contradictory. I well remember the Commonwealth education ministers’ conference in 1984, which was the first opportunity the Commonwealth had of expressing an opinion on the subject. My right honourable friend Sir Keith Joseph was averse to attending conferences of that sort and so sent me in his place. The conference was a rerun of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift and I would not have missed it for anything, but I could not deny that we were creating a major obstacle to our ambition then. I am delighted to say that we have overcome it by the system of scholarships that we have used. The rules then involved a commitment on the part of the student to leave the country after his studies had been completed. I can remember any number of students who approached me as a constituency Member of Parliament to ask whether there was any way in which they could subvert that rule. Speaking very generally, it could be said that the Bill restores some aspects of those rules by making it more difficult for the student to achieve that ambition. I shall be interested in the Minister’s reply when she comes to make it—I think she may make it as soon as I sit down—and, unless this stretches her terms of reference, her view of how the Government square the provisions in the Bill with seeking to solve the problems of the NHS by persuading doctors and nurses to come to this country when they are badly needed in the third world.