Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this interesting debate. It is important that we understand the wider context of what we are doing here. We are seeking to improve the Bill. It is the role of this House to provide scrutiny and oversight and to improve legislation that may be defective or could be improved. As I said in opening, this amendment would improve the Bill. We all know about judicial activism, the threat of judicial review and, not least, the opposition of the Minister’s Back-Benchers in the other place. The Home Secretary’s new proposals may very well fall foul of judicial review, so anything in primary legislation that protects the Government and enables them to carry out their stated policies is probably a good thing. I am somewhat discombobulated by the transformation of the Minister from bruiser to pussycat today. He will concede that he has not always been like that. The context of this is that I asked six parliamentary Questions between March and June this year and got the same vacuous answers from the department—including that it will “always undertake a thorough, comprehensive review of statistics”. He will forgive me if I am slightly less willing to take this on board. I make the distinction between the Minister, who is a man of honour and integrity, and the department in which he is a Minister, which does not always put some issues at the top of its priorities. I will leave it at that. To respond quickly to the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, I reassure her that there was no inference that all foreign students are criminals and are therefore likely to be deported. That is why I specifically said on Report: “I want to make it clear that the vast majority of those individuals come, study hard and contribute to our society and economy, but there is a minority who abuse that privilege—and it is a privilege. We have some of the world’s top universities in our country, and it is not an automatic right to be here”.—[Official Report, 5/11/25; col. 1932.] I stand by those words. I am concerned about the lack of focus on this issue. I was confused by the letter from the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, to my noble friend Lord Harper. It did not seem to have a focus on risk assessment and was not clear about what data would be collected. The Government seem particularly ill prepared, as my noble friend alluded to, for the visa ban policy on Angola and other countries if they do not collect and publish basic data. Finally, we seem to have no idea of a timescale. We have constantly been promised that a protocol is in place for the collection and publication of data, but it is always mañana —it is always tomorrow.