My Lords, I support the amendments of my noble friend Lord Lucas. This is probably the first shot in a considerable battle in which I hope this House will engage. There is a certain irony which I cannot pass over in complete silence. I was the junior Minister who, in 1981, had to take the full force of opposition from the Liberal Party, the Labour Party, members of my own party and every right-thinking person in what the President-elect of the United States would call the liberal intelligentsia for allowing universities to charge economic fees for their overseas students. Not a single overseas student would come, we were told. This was the end of the civilisation as we knew it. As a matter of fact, of course, not only did the students come in ever-greater numbers but we had provided a wonderful independent source of income for our universities, and thereby saved them at a time when the Treasury and other people were always trying to cut the money. Without those flows of money, our universities would be in very serious trouble. There would not be graduate departments of engineering in many of our great London-based colleges without overseas students, and it is an absolute absurdity not to separate students.
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As we all know, and as my noble friend Lord Willetts has made clear in other fora, there is perfectly good evidence available to show that the Home Office should declare victory in its legitimate campaign to close down bogus colleges, of which there jolly well were some. My wife used to preside over and own a very distinguished cookery school, but there were cookery schools down the road which had no need of ovens or anything of that kind because they were bogus—people disappeared into the hinterland and that was the end of it. The Home Office ran a legitimate campaign against them and has won it. There will always be a few, but it really has transformed that, and well done to it—that is a good thing to have done.
All the real surveys show that the figures for overstayers are very low, so I really cannot understand the policy. I know it does not derive from this department, but from elements in the Home Office proceeding in a manner akin to the “Titanic” heading towards an iceberg. There will be a crash in due course, and we have to help them avert it. My noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendments are in some ways on the fringes of this, and other amendments have been put down, but of all the important things facing universities at the moment, almost the most important is to preserve their capacity to win their share of overseas students and to charge them economic fees where they can pay. It is a wonderful resource for this country and will continue to be so. I hope that your Lordships will
remain adamant on this matter and that we may persuade the Government that they are doing, by accident I think, something which could be immensely dangerous.