My Lords, Amendment 26 covers ground similar to that covered by an amendment much later in the proceedings, Amendment 49, which we will not be dealing with tonight. Amendment 26 is about appeals and seeks to remove from the scope of the Bill appeals by undergraduate or postgraduate students in full-time study at a recognised higher education institution.
Why am I moving this amendment? There is much common ground with the Government about the important role that the higher education sector plays in our economy and, above all, that our universities play in our economy. It is a massive benefit to this country. It accounted for £10.1 billion of invisible exports at the last time of asking, and that figure is rising and should continue to rise. It is also common ground with the Government and with those in the university sector—I declare an interest as I sit on the council of the University of Kent—that we want to see those student numbers increasing. Last July, the Government published a strategy for international students, and in it they foresaw a steady increase in the years ahead. They hoped for some 15% in the next few years.
There is also the less tangible aspect of the benefits to this country from postgraduate and undergraduate students, which is called “soft power”. When they have qualified, these students very frequently go back to their countries and retain very strong links with this country, often doing much business with our exporters, and are thus generally very positive. That is the good news.
The bad news is that the Government’s immigration policy is cumulatively hamstringing this vital invisible export industry. That is before the measures in the Bill, several of which are likely to be quite damaging, have taken effect. This cumulative effect is now under way, and if you ask me whether these concerns are well founded, the most recent figures produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency in January 2014, which cover the last academic year for which there are figures—2012-13—are disturbing indeed. Those figures are before the cumulative effect that would come from this Bill because, of course, it is not yet in force.
I shall not go into too much detail on the figures, because there was a good deal of coverage of them at Second Reading, but some really stand out. The main one is that in the year 2012-13 overall numbers dropped for the first time since figures were produced in the early 1990s. They dropped by 1%. More seriously,
perhaps, the figures for postgraduates—and postgraduates from countries outside the EU are extremely important for the future of our universities—dropped by 4%. Some of the figures for the countries of origin of large numbers of students coming to this country are really terrifying. The figure for India dropped by 49% in two years, and there are very substantial drops in the figures for those from Pakistan and other countries of the Indian subcontinent, Nigeria and so on. That is in a period when the figures for our main competitors—the United States and Australia—were going up, by 7% for the United States and 6.9% for Australia. The market is growing, we are losing market share, and that is not good news for this country.
In addition, I suggest that Ministers look at a recent study conducted by the National Union of Students, which it made available to those of us who are interested in this matter, and which was based on 3,000 students from outside the EU currently studying in this country. They were asked in January of this year about their reaction to certain matters. That, too, was not very comforting. The chilling effect that the Government’s immigration policies are having and are likely to have was very clear: 51% of those non-EU students found the UK Government’s attitude towards them “unwelcoming”. Has the Minister studied this survey by the National Union of Students? These people have no particular interest in the matter, because they are here already. However, they said in much larger numbers than that 51% that if they had been asked to undertake some of the burdens in the Bill, they probably would not have come; they would have gone somewhere else.
The question is: why not carve students out of the Bill? There is no requirement for the Government to include students in the Bill for public policy purposes. I accept that the Government have to make a return on economic migration to the UN, which has to include students as well as those who are more properly regarded as economic migrants. However, there is no need whatever for the Government to apply their immigration policy, these new measures, to students because they are economic migrants; of course, they are really not. These people bring to this country very large resources, to which I have already referred: £10.1 billion net in the course of the most recent year. They bring jobs to this country because they are creating employment in our universities. The study by the University of Sheffield, of which I am sure Ministers are well aware, shows just how much of a contribution they make to the economies of many of our university cities and towns.
Why are the Government not therefore prepared to listen to the views of four or five—I cannot remember the exact number now; it goes up all the time—Select Committees which have all said, “Please do not treat students, for public policy purposes, as economic migrants, because you are damaging a resource vital to this country”? I hope that the Government will reflect further on this and will see the advantages to them and to the whole country of simply removing them from the Bill. I hope we will then all be able to work together, which is what universities want to do. Those of us who work for universities want to see a buoyant,
increasing number of students, undergraduates and postgraduates in full-time education, coming to this country and bringing huge benefits to us.