Baroness Lawlor (Con)

My Lords, this group of amendments proposes the means to make transparent one of the constituent parts of the high immigration levels that the Government aim to reduce. The amendments propose making transparent the data on the numbers granted student visas and the numbers of dependents, capping the numbers—in the case of the amendments that will follow, Amendments 198 and 199—and dealing with those who offend and the home countries of offenders. I shall focus on my Amendment 141A, which proposes an annual statement on the number of visas given to overseas students and their dependents, because they contribute significantly to the overall immigration numbers, on which this Government and the previous one have concentrated in order to get them down. The evidence that we have is piecemeal. It covers a range of periods and categories and comes from the Home Office, the ONS and the Higher Education Statistics Authority, but all of the evidence indicates that overseas students’ visas and those issued for dependents constitute a large cohort of the immigration numbers. In the previous academic year ending September 2024, there were 732,285 overseas students at higher education institutions in the UK. That is almost 25% of the total student population. Around one in 10 came from the EU, while 90% of them came from further across the world. Although the total was down from the very high period of 2022-23—a record high, as it happens—these figures from 2023-24 are still the second-highest ever for overseas students and their dependents. We want to find out what the top countries are. India was top of the list, sending 107,500—almost nine times the number from India in 2017-18. China, which sent the most students for 10 years, is now in second place; it sent 98,400. There have been rapid increases from Nigeria, which is in third place. The figures for Nigeria will come up in my notes in a moment, so I will come back to them, but it is in third place. Now we have another set of figures, though, from the Home Office. I want to talk about them. They give an indication of the numbers for the year ending in June this year—the year in which the Labour Government have been in power. From them, we discovered that the number of student visas granted for the year ending June 2025 was 436,000; that was higher than the average from 2012-21, which was an average of 305,000, although it was much smaller than in the peak year of 2023, which was the year when 650,000 student visas were granted. During that time, there were 18,000 dependents—a far lower figure than the 154,000 who came in before that. That is, I think, due to the previous Government’s attempts to curb the figures. What we see from this is that student visas for overseas students still run at a very high rate. If we take the figures for the year ending June and multiply them, say, by three, we are looking at well over a million people in the country on overseas student visas. For these reasons, it would be very helpful for Parliament, and indeed the public, to know on an annual basis the number of overseas student visas granted, and the numbers granted to dependents, and whether that is increasing or falling. That kind of information in an accessible and consistent form will help identify the nature and scale of the question, whether it is indeed a serious problem and, if so, how we can deal with it.