UK Borders Bill

My Lords, the figures that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, quoted are staggering. The existing figures go a long way to explain why I have heard over recent years significant anxiety from the management of universities and other organisations for higher education and from student unions about the whole area that he has just described. When this country is eager to gather people from overseas to study here, and when the long-term advantages in terms of relationships 20 or 30 years down the line are critically important in ways that we cannot foresee but have been shown over decades, it would be short-sighted to add insult to injury to charge over the odds for biometric data. It is bad enough to be charging over the odds already. It is quite wrong that there should be profiteering, to use the good word used by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, in this matter at all. We want to encourage people, not put them off, and it is very important. The same thing is true for the other things in this amendment, mutatis mutandis. I put my name to it because I felt particularly strongly about the universities and colleges of higher education.