Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

I declare an interest on behalf of Cardiff University and its courses and as a co-opted member of the Medical Schools Council. I apologise to the Committee for not contributing at Second Reading; there was a clash of timing with other legislation. The amendment raises very important points and highlights concerns that have been expressed about the clause. I will confine my remarks to medicine. Students entering to study medicine at Oxford, Cambridge or St Andrews have no idea when they enter where they will do their clinical studies after their first three years. In fact, where they go depends on how they perform in those first three years, so it is completely unpredictable. The other difficulty is that the courses are for six years. At the end of the six years, the students have to enter a pre-registration year. Although they are paid and employed, they still fall under the supervision of the undergraduate dean. At the end of the pre-registration year, the Medical Act requires the undergraduate dean to state that the student is fit to be fully registered. The length of the undergraduate course alone does not determine the completion and registration of a medical degree. Without being registered—they are registered with the GMC—their degree has very little currency. The other problem is often that they do undergraduate studies and then wish to progress on to postgraduate studies. Indeed, they come to this country in the first place because that type of training is simply not available in the country in which they have been, because the places are so restricted or because there have been restrictions against the ethnic group to which they belong in their country of origin. As the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, outlined at Second Reading, the amount of money that is brought into this country is not inconsiderable. She estimated that it was more than £100 million. I think that that is probably an underestimate, because postgraduate students come over as well. Those who come over as postgraduate students present a different set of problems. We now have an increasing number of distance-learning courses. The students come across for study days but do a lot of study in their own country on their own clinical base. They then come back for their exams and to graduate. They may be on such a course, which is a part-time course, for up to six years. The length of time will depend to some extent on how quickly they progress through the course and to some extent, as they are adult learners, on what other life events intervene that cause them to require an interruption of study. When they are the lead in their specialty in their own country and they want to undertake postgraduate study abroad, it takes very little to make the workload insurmountable, leading to them having to take a temporary leave of absence from their course. One difficulty for students on a distance learning course is how much they have to guarantee the maintenance. Perhaps I may refer to the course that I run which takes students up to MSc level. If they come across for a study week, will they have to guarantee that they have maintenance funding for that week when they have already enrolled in a course of study? During this debate, we have heard much about those of mal-intent, but I do not think that we should underestimate the economic, cultural and scientific advantage to this country of many of the students who come here. We are in very stiff competition for those students with other parts of the world, particularly the USA and Australasia, but increasingly with other countries, particularly in the Far East. The current economic climate means that any students have to be very careful about the fees that they pay and the obstacles which are in their way to coming here. In summing up, I ask the Minister to confirm that all these points have been considered in discussions that he has had with Universities UK, to inform the Committee how extensive his discussions have been with the Medical Schools Council and to say how postgraduate students on distance learning courses in particular would be affected by this clause.