Mark Easton
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Sep 2010
Mark Easton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I think he's got a bit of a problem.
That figure of net migration is a factor of many, many things.
And while the previous government, and to some extent this current government, has been quite successful in squeezing the numbers of non-EU workers coming into the UK, there's another element which has suddenly popped up, which is student visas.
We saw in the last quarter that
a fantastically big increase of 35% in the number of student visas being issued.
And so what we saw with Damien Green was, yes, a continued commitment to reduce the net migration figure to below 100,000, a recognition that just squeezing the workers' bit of it is not going to be enough.
And so he's having to turn his attention to those students.
The Home Office published an excellent report called The Migrant's Journey, which looked at a cohort of migrants who came to Britain, I think, in 2004, and asked the question, where are they, in fact, in 2009?
And the Home Office selected from that document...
the fact that of those people who'd arrived on a student visa in 2004, 21%, a fifth, were still in Britain in 2009.
And they kind of left it there.
The question is, well, what conclusion are we to draw from this figure?
I think there was a sense in which just saying a fifth of them are still here five years on was to invite people to say, oh, that sounds absolutely appalling.
Actually, the original report from which that figure comes comes to a very different conclusion about that 21% figure.
Let me read actually what the report says.
It says the findings relating to the study route appear to be consistent with the pattern expected for students coming to the UK.
And they make the point that a small proportion of students on one-year courses leave the system fairly early, while those on mid-length courses, graduate, postgraduate degrees and so on, are likely to remain for three years or more, and that a small proportion remain in the system temporarily.
as a student in 2009, having been on perhaps long-term career education like medical students or having taken more than one course of study.
So far from this 21% figure being something that we should all be really worried about, what the report is saying is this is exactly what we should have expected.
No, we don't.
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