Education (Student Support) (European University Institute) Regulations 2010

My Lords, I declare some interests on this. For five years my wife was at the European University Institute, was a student at the College of Europe and for 25 years a visiting professor there. Indeed, among others, she recruited the young Stephen Kinnock to the College of Europe to help him escape from his parents who were far too well known in British politics by going to Brussels where, at that point, they were unknown. It was an unfortunate failure. The concern many of us have on this is precisely about making sure that British expertise and British interests are properly recognised within the European institutions. Those are not just the Commission, but the Council Secretariat, the European Parliament and its secretariat and the whole range of Brussels-based institutions. I suppose that I should also declare an interest in that I have taught many of the people who now work in those institutions, almost all of whom are not British. That is one of the problems we face: we under-recruit to those institutions. At the top, at the level of directors-general and so on, we have a number of very good British people, many of whom were indeed students at the College of Europe, but for the last few years we have not been sending enough students through any means to the European institutions. The Government have a poor record in this respect because they abolished the European fast stream. After a good deal of lobbying by a number of us, myself included, they have at last reconstituted the European fast stream, but when we asked what had happened to the College of Europe scholarships, we discovered that the question of how they fitted in with the European fast stream had not been addressed. There were no figures for how many people had gone on to join the European institutions from there, so this was a decision that clearly had been taken at a low level, without apparent ministerial involvement and without considering the consequences. It is, as has been made clear in the speeches from the Conservative Benches, a matter of all-party consensus in this House that we need to have high-quality British candidates working for us in the various European institutions and more widely in the intergovernmental organisations as a whole. Indeed, it is a matter to which we should return on another occasion because the broader issues of languages and of getting bright young British people to think about working internationally is something that we all need to address. I just wish to add my voice strongly to those who have said that this was a poor decision taken, it appears, without thought for the wider implications or policy consequences, and without looking back at the files to see why this policy had been instituted in the first place.