Lord Davies of Gower (Con)

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough for tabling Motion A1, that this House, “do insist on its Amendment 37”. The amendment that we made to the Bill on Report has a simple purpose. My noble friend simply wishes the Home Office to publish data on overseas students, and that is a wish that I share. The reason given by the other place for disagreeing with our Amendment 37 is that they, “do not consider it appropriate for there to be a statutory requirement to publish the data listed in the Amendment, the release of which should be determined within the wider publication of official statistics on migration”. I agree with the basic premise here that an amendment to primary legislation is not necessarily the best way in which to force the publication of statistics. Ideally, we would not have to go down the legislative avenue to get the Home Office to publish these statistics. However, when my noble friend has repeatedly asked the Government to do so and they still refuse, this is the only option that we are left with. There is a very simple solution to all this—just publish the data. The Home Office must know how many visas it revokes and how many people it removes from the country. Surely, it knows how many of those revocations and removals are of foreign students. I wholeheartedly support my noble friend in trying to force the publication of this data and, should he decide to test the opinion of the House, we will support him.