Student Visas

Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe Excerpts

Monday 27th April 2026 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of (1) the adequacy of training and quality-assurance processes for student visa caseworkers, and (2) decision-making in the student visa route.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

The UK Visas and Immigration service has a comprehensive training programme kept under regular review to support consistently high standards of decisions. This is supported by a quality assurance framework that draws on feedback from the study sector and incorporates evidence from the independent administrative review process, ensuring that lessons are learned and systematically embedded into operational practice.

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for that reply. The universities agree that the changes to thresholds in the compliance assessment metrics should help to further reduce the scope for abuse and non-compliance, but I understand that some real problems have arisen. These relate to the red/amber/green methodology, the lack of real-time data sharing with UKVI, visa processing delays and the lack of clarity about the reasons for a sudden upsurge in visa refusals. Given the massive impact of decisions on international student recruitment on the finances of universities, will the Minister agree to meet me and Universities UK to try to help to resolve some of these concerns?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am very happy to meet my noble friend and representatives from the university sector. It is extremely important that we make this work properly for both sectors as a whole, and I know that officials in the department are in constant touch with the sector to look at how we can improve performance. In 2025, 448,241 entry clearance applications were received and only 18,434 were refused, which is about 4%.