I thank the two noble Lords who contributed to the debate and the Minister for his response. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, about the positive message that this sends. That is what I was trying to get across in moving this amendment.
Equally, I accept the Minister’s use of the term “abuse of the system”. No one would be tolerant of that at all. There were such situations in the past in the case particularly of language schools. Some of them had been—to use about the kindest adjective that could be applied to them—“bogus”. Very largely, these have been driven out of the system. I would not say that there is no abuse, but there is not a great deal. Opening up the further education sector does not necessarily increase the likelihood of such abuse.
I take the Minister’s point that the Higher Education and Research Bill is the place to deal with that. Fortunately for him, he will not have to do that, but I will be returning to these subjects next week. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that, hopefully, the further education sector has the opportunity to broaden its scope a bit. Whereas local provision is what it is mainly about, there is scope to expand that and I hope that the sector will take the opportunity to do so and will not be prevented from doing so through the inability to bring students in from abroad.
With those remarks, I beg leave to withdraw this amendment.