Baroness Lawlor (Con)

My Lords, my Amendment 35C aims to stop people who come to the UK on a student visa abandoning that route for an asylum claim. Today, I will explain why such an amendment is needed, and then I will respond to the objections made by the Minister, take account of them and explain why this amendment meets the most substantive one. First, why is this amendment needed? Around 435,000 people were granted student visas in the 12 months to June 2025. In the same period, 111,000 people claimed asylum, of whom 14,800 had entered the UK on a student visa. So, 13% of claims for asylum were made by student visa switches. The consequences—as I explained, so I will not run through them again in detail—are serious. For university finances, the ability to plan courses and allocate places suffers if students accept and are allocated a place but drop out mid-course or never show up, leaving empty places, damaging the finances and creating black holes for the university. They are not, except in a few cases, innocents overtaken by dangerous political changes at home, which my Amendment 35C now covers; rather, they are people who abuse the student visa route and exploit the laxity of our rules and the by now reluctant generosity of our taxpayers. I may have mentioned a recent report of a couple from India who candidly spoke anonymously on camera to a reporter. The wife had got her student visa but had no intention, she said, of taking up her place. An agency had been engaged to see to the paperwork and fake the financial and other eligibility documents. That couple are now living on benefits and hope they will be given asylum because one of their children has a bad medical condition. In Committee, the Minister made three sorts of objections to my amendment, designed to include claims from student visa holders made two days after arrival. The first was also mentioned by my noble friend Lord Sandhurst. I therefore take account of this, the substantive objection in both the Minister’s and my own Front Bench’s argument. A two-day time limit does not cover unfortunate students who dutifully pursue their degree courses but discover, sometime into it, that the political circumstances have changed and they could face imprisonment, torture or even execution if they go home. Today’s amendment allows for these changed circumstances.