Dame Meg Hillier

Dame Meg Hillier

Labour (Co-op) — Hackney South and Shoreditch

Speaking in the House of Commons on 25 April 2025

Debate

Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill

Contribution

My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. I absolutely take what the hon. Member for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry highlighted. As I said, there are really challenging issues with the demographics in the Scottish population. We all need to put our shoulder to the wheel to deal with those things, rather than saying, “If only the SNP Scottish Government were in charge of immigration, it would all be fine.” This Bill is a gimmick, and the hon. Gentleman knows that it will not work. I will touch on the higher education figures. In the last two years, we have seen the number of home Scottish students drop. In 2021-22, the figure was just over 183,000, and it has dropped to just shy of 174,000. The number of non-UK students has gone down in the past couple of years, but it is nevertheless a significant number at 73,915. The Government are not against foreign students coming here—that is important—but we need to strike a balance, so that there are enough places for the young people in Scotland and across the UK who want to attend Scottish universities, and who are perhaps being squeezed out by the imbalance and the cost of going.

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