Digital Technology

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 5th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I find myself on the optimistic side of this debate. Listening to the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, reminded me of reading Socrates’s strictures on writing and the dangers of the spread of that new technology. Much of the activities that the noble Lord attributed to modern terrorists must have been in Socrates’s mind as he was thinking of what they could do now that they had this additional skill.

When I was young, the scare was television. It probably has not done us much good one way or the other: we are probably less healthy than we were; we are probably less good at concentrating and socialising. In that context, the internet, social networks and games are a great advance. To the extent that it has been demonstrated that they do good, they increase people’s performance in short-term memory. It has been shown that in some contexts, heavy users of Facebook are actually better at off-line relationships than people who use it less. There are also research papers that tend in the other direction. The overall picture, however, is one of a revolution which is, though frightening and fast, on average benign. I side with my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood in saying that we are much better now at writing than we were 20 years ago. The world was full of reluctant letter writers when I was 30, and now it is full of keen e-mailers and bloggers. We do much more of it and we read much more of it. The effect on music—the appreciation and spread of music—seems to me to have been strongly positive.

The noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, referred to the plasticity of our brains. That is indeed one of our great characteristics. We must therefore be conscious that any great change, such as what we are experiencing, may have effects of which we ought to be careful. As she said, we ought to be doing research into this, particularly meta-studies to give us a clear picture, because individual studies will always have a scatter of results. We ought to be doing proper meta-studies to really look at the questions raised by the noble Baroness. I hope she will be sufficiently piqued by Ben Goldacre to contribute to that process herself.

Protection of Freedoms Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I like this Bill. There is a lot of it that I shall take a deep interest in as it goes through. I am sure my noble friend is well aware of my interest in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, freedom of information and vehicles left on land but all those have been very well covered by others. I should make a quick declaration: a proportion of my DNA is on the national database—probably enough to identify me—and there is a clause in the freedom of information sections which will resolve various disputes I have with various universities in my favour. So I shall be careful when we come to that.

I want to concentrate on the section on biometrics in schools. This section is a daffy overreaction. Biometric systems are very widely used in schools. They have great benefits and I am not aware of any instance of serious problems with them. They improve safety. They mean that you know where the kids are, and in some schools that is very important. They improve privacy, because you can no longer tell who is claiming free school meals, and that generally results in a large uptake of free school meals. They greatly improve efficiency, because you no longer have to divert teachers to supervisory jobs which are done quickly and efficiently. Kids are used to it, because a lot of the systems that they are familiar with incorporate biometric systems.

The Explanatory Memorandum talks about risks as if they have been established, but I have not seen anybody create a scenario where there is a believable, practical risk to the kids in any way at all. We are dealing here not with something that is available nationally but with a closed system, a community that is using this data within itself—which we do here. All of us are subject to a highly sophisticated biometric scanning device every day: they are called doorkeepers. They do not scare us, and they are not a danger to us. The fact that they recognise us without difficulty is not something that gives rise to problems.

Within a closed community, the fears that people have on the wider scale do not apply. It is as if we put exclusion zones around hospitals that were using nuclear medicine, in case something exploded. It is just not real. It is an association of words which has been got up by the Daily Mail, of course—that lover of freedom, that respecter of privacy, that hater of intrusion—because it made a good story and it scared people. I am very sorry that both our beloved parties took it seriously and have stuck something in the coalition agreement which I suspect to some extent means that we have to keep it in the Bill. But I very much hope that we will be able to get some amendments through which will avoid or at least reduce the waste of resources which will result from the Bill as it is at the moment, and the increase in the incidents of bullying which will result if we cannot use this system consistently, particularly where free school meals are concerned. It gives me some pleasure that the Daily Mail, that scourge of government waste, is setting out to increase it, but I hope to save them from their own excesses.

Education Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 4th October 2011 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

146: After Clause 73, insert the following new Clause—
“Disclaimer of eligibility for student support
(1) Any student over the age of 18 (or if under that age, with the consent of the student’s parents or guardian) may disclaim the right to such financial support or arrangements as may from time to time be offered by or on behalf of the Secretary of State to such students.
(2) Such a student may then apply to be admitted to a university as if he or she were a candidate from outside the European Union, and shall for all purposes be considered to be such a candidate.
(3) A student who has made such a disclaimer may withdraw it at any time, but not in respect of any course to which he or she has been admitted as if he or she were from outside the European Union.”

[Lord Lucas]

I beg to move Amendment 146 and speak to Amendment 147A. My objective is to nudge the Government gently in the direction of common sense and fairness in these two amendments. One of the effects of the Government’s policies over the last year or two, particularly with regard to the Office for Fair Access, which looks set to reduce the number of students going from high-performing English schools to Oxford and Cambridge by about 500 a year, and as an effect of the fees increase, has seen a very considerable rise in interest in the prospect of going to university overseas.

At the cheaper level, it costs about a couple of thousand pounds plus living expenses to get a very decent university education in the Netherlands. That is becoming an increasingly popular destination, notably for the leafier end of the state school system. I thoroughly recommend Maastricht as a university, begging the pardon of my more sensitive colleagues on these Benches. It is actually a very fine and innovative university, and for those parents who would intend anyway to repay their children’s debt, and not leave them with that hanging over them, it represents a very considerable saving.

To have our children going abroad anyway is probably quite a good thing for this country, and over the long term it should increase our understanding of the world outside our shores, and bring us added understanding, if not prosperity. At the higher end, principally affected by the changes being made in OFFA, we are seeing very substantial increases in numbers of students interested in going to the United States. The rate of application is up by about 30 per cent this year. Fees in the US are extremely substantial. There are some good scholarships available. Some of the brighter state comprehensives have been picking up one or two of them, and long may that continue. However, a lot of this outflow will be children who have gone to independent schools, whose parents see that they have the qualifications that would formerly have taken them to top universities, but who have now been squeezed out—so they are off to America, Canada, Australia or, indeed, China. You can get to some very high-ranking universities in Hong Kong for not much more than the cost of a British degree. Indeed, one of them is a subsidiary of Nottingham University. So you can pay to go to a British university overseas. It seems a bit daft to me that our own universities, which are strapped for cash enough as it is, should see this flow of students going out to pay high fees overseas and not be able to bring them back and have those fees for themselves. Why should we deny our universities that benefit? Why should our students find that the only universities in the world that they cannot pay a fee for are our own universities and why should our universities find that a natural flow of students is denied to them? So I hope, while not expecting any immediate comfort today, that the Government will think along those lines.

I would like to see some progress today on Amendment 147A. It has long been the practice of universities, when students were largely funded by the Government, to rob Peter to pay Paul—to take money that was notionally allocated to students studying humanities degrees and use it to fund courses being pursued by those studying science degrees, in particular. That is all very well when it is just reallocating government money, but when you are taking money that a student has invested themselves and transferring it away from that student to some other student’s course, I think that that becomes morally indefensible. I would very much like to see any such activity done openly and with a proper disclosure of what a student is receiving in return for their fees and where the money is being spent by the university. Then a student who is looking to go on what has been traditionally a rather underprovided course with few contact hours can see whether or not they are being offered a reasonable bargain in return for their £9,000 a year. I beg to move.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My name is also on Amendment 146 and I very much support what my noble friend has said. I shall add one or two other arguments to the powerful arguments that he has already made.

My noble friend said that losing some of our good students to go abroad for their studies might be a good thing. Yes, it would be good for a few. International education, whether at undergraduate or graduate level, is a well established tradition among the brighter and best students, and that is a good thing. But it is a very foolish country that stands aside and watches a very large number of its brightest and best students being lost, particularly since those who go to the United States tend to stay. There are good statistics showing this. We lose some of our best talent if we allow them to go and finish their undergraduate and postgraduate study there and then be snapped up by American companies.

The other argument that has always seemed to me quite powerful is that we have and recognise in this country, without much debate, that we have private schools as well as state schools. We know perfectly well the way in which private school fees have been accelerating in recent years. Many parents are now paying £12,000 or £13,000 per year for day schools, if they are lucky—some more than that—and, for boarding schools, at least double that. It has always seemed very strange that those same parents whose children go on to higher education are suddenly released from what many of us see as the burden of school fees to a very much reduced sum of money. I have many times dwelt with friends on one anecdote from my time as head of a Cambridge college. One of my fresher students came bouncing up to me in the first week of term and said, “Oh, come and look at what my daddy has given me as a present for coming up to university”. It was a brand new BMW 7 Series, which would have accounted for at least three years of fees at £9,000 a year plus, or her maintenance. I thought, yes, Daddy is celebrating because he does not have to pay your very high school fees any longer. I am sure that my college and university could have done with that money and made good use of it.

It seems quite extraordinary that we do not allow parents—who could very well afford to continue to pay the fees—simply to opt their children out of the entire loans company system and, therefore, to have their children treated like overseas students, where the university can set their fees and they are outwith the quota for those eligible for loans. Putting these very bright students off-quota and giving them the encouragement and opportunity to go to our best universities would be to their benefit and hugely to the benefit of the country. Therefore, I wholly hope that the Government will seriously consider this possibility of having private students who would be off-quota but who of course would have exactly the same entry requirements as those who are eligible for loans. As my noble friend says, we do not expect an answer today. This is not a backdoor route for people to buy their way into higher education. Their access arrangements and entry requirements would have to be exactly the same. But it would enable us to keep some of those very bright young people here in British universities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Verma]

I think the bottom line is, of course, that it is all down to affordability. We need to be clear on that. Universities have a finite budget too.

I will not fall into the eloquent spider’s web of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes. I shall just say to him that Scotland has a devolved Administration and therefore sets its own agenda. Steering neatly away from that, I take this opportunity to thank all noble Lords for their contributions on this Bill today, given that this was my first outing in higher education. It has been quite a baptism, but I am hoping that when I come in on higher education matters in the future, I will be there from the beginning and will understand a little more clearly the temperaments of noble Lords.

This is the final group of amendments, but I understand very clearly that there will still be questions that remain outstanding. Therefore I am happy to meet noble Lords, be it after this meeting in Room 16 on the Principal Floor, or in future. I have very much an open-door approach to the way I do my business in the House.

I give this opportunity to all noble Lords to come and speak to us. We want to make sure that the legislation, when it goes from this House, is in its best form, and noble Lords are there to ensure that with me. The Welfare Reform Bill is about to commence, so on that note I will sit down and allow the noble Lord to withdraw.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that answer. To be disappointed by my noble friend, and encouraged by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, is indeed unusual. I hope that we will have at least the second part of that again. I shall now take an interest in the Scotland Bill.

I am grateful for what my noble friend said on Amendment 147A. I will read it carefully and come back to her on that. Because there is so much past practice in this area, this is something we need to take carefully.

As for Amendment 146, I find this an odd position for us to be taking. There are an awful lot of people in this country who pay for education from the ages of five to 18, and indeed before that. To suddenly cut that off at 18, as if it was in some way dirty, seems to me to be odd. If we are conducting things so that we are not displacing poorer children from the education they might otherwise receive, but are increasing the amount of money which is available to the institutions which are educating those poorer children, then that seems to me to be a sensible and constructive way to go.

I do not know how my right honourable friend the Prime Minister’s dictum should be applied to his alma mater, but perhaps one day I will be able to listen to him on that. For the moment I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 146 withdrawn.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tonge]

I am not going to give way again. I must finish. We must contrast this action with what has happened in the past couple of weeks where Raed Salah, a Palestinian—

[Lord Lucas]

I beg to move that the noble Baroness be no longer heard.

Motion agreed.

Controlling Migration

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

I am grateful for the noble Lord’s welcome of the general proposition that we have laid out.

On the noble Lord’s first point about the monitoring of educational establishments, including those that are in the category of highly trusted sponsor, there will indeed be monitoring. I think that monitoring is already in place for many schools that have had to register in order to be providers of English language teaching. The monitoring of attendance, of the qualifications awarded and of the compliance of the institution in meeting its obligations under its sponsorship arrangements will indeed be carried out and spot checks may occur. I think that all institutions will be on notice that their obligations need to be taken seriously. Of course, if institutions do not take those seriously, they will lose their sponsorship status.

On the noble Lord’s second point, we entirely accept that those who want to bring people into this country, whether for study or for employment, need to know where they stand. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary has made it clear that she wants to get through the next stage—clearly, a big block of migrant movement is by students, who are, at something like 51 per cent, by far the biggest category of migrants—as soon as possible. Progress must, if I may say so, be consistent with having a proper consultation on how to do that, but the object will be to conclude that consultation so that we can put in place a system—and a level—that is reasonable and that serves the interests of this country.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords—

[Lord Maclennan of Rogart]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Attlee]

There is plenty of time. Let us have a Conservative and then a Liberal Democrat.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am grateful. I am delighted that there is to be a consultation on students and I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to include me in that consultation as editor of the Good Schools Guide and let me know who else is being consulted. I very much hope that it will include all further education institutions, private and public. I regret the derogatory tone taken about that sector in the Statement; many good-quality institutions provide excellent courses below degree level, which are in great demand throughout the world. We should export a strong and large export industry employing many people in this country. I agree that it should have quality controls and that the previous Government were remiss in completely failing to install the sort of system that has just been talked about, but we should be positive about the sector and support it as there is a great deal of good there and a great deal of employment.

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

My Lords, I think that that sentiment would be widely shared in the House. It is certainly shared in the Government. If the consultation that has just been conducted on the employment sector is anything to go by, the House can be confident that this consultation will also be wide-ranging and thorough. In this particular consultation with business, we talked to something like 30,000 individuals and had something like 3,000 responses, which I understand was a record for this kind of consultation, speaking to upwards of 1,000 employers. I lay that on the line because it indicates that we have been a listening Government and far from a confused one. We will do the same in other sectors.

Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules (Cm 7944)

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 25th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hylton]

My Lords, successive Governments have declared that they favour families and family life, and I personally have always defended the principle of family reunion for people accepted into this country on a long-term basis. Now we find that this Government are meanly changing the rules to discriminate against accepted refugees and to take away rights that they have enjoyed for many years to bring in their immediate families. The Government should bear in mind that genuine refugees have almost always suffered persecution and may well have suffered additionally through harm in the process of escaping or reaching this country. There is a strong argument for allowing refugees to bring in their next of kin when it is possible. Quite often it may not be possible for a whole variety of reasons.

I support what the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, said about language tests and what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, said about process and lack of consultation, especially on refugees. I urge the Government to pay attention to your Lordships’ recent debate on immigration but, above all, I ask them to have second thoughts on family reunion for refugees.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I share the worries expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, in this area and his concern about where we are heading on this policy. It is not that I share his fundamental opposition to it as a policy, but we seem to be implementing it in a very dogmatic way rather than taking account of the needs of the economy and putting the primacy of economic growth and recovery first. That concerns me very much.

I am also concerned by the particular subject of the noble Lord’s Motion—that we should not have the cap in legislation. As he says, interim solutions can last a long time. We are an interim solution approaching its hundredth year. I find myself in many ways in sympathy with him and will therefore listen to my noble friend on the Front Bench with great interest when she comes to reply.

My particular concern is with the implementation of tier 4. The last figure that I had was that more than 60 pupils at top-ranked independent schools were still stuck abroad at half term because their process is not being completed. It is a common experience for schools of endless difficult bureaucracy and of parents and pupils in tears. There are real problems in recruiting students—and for what known problem created by the independent schools sector or students in it? What is all this expense for at the UK Border Agency and the Home Office? Why are we wasting money on controlling things that do not need to be controlled? In doing so, we are damaging an industry in which we have a great reputation and which, in the wider sense, particularly for further education, brings in several billion pounds a year of earnings to this country.

Why are we beset with extraordinarily idiotic rules, such as the one whereby a qualification has to be approved by Ofqual if we allow someone to come into this country for more than six months to study? That means that we cannot bring people in to study our renowned courses in air traffic control or the safety of oil wells, but we can bring them in to study cake decorating. That is just daft. There are other little things. If someone comes here on a six-month tourist visa and in the middle of it decides that they would like to learn English, they have to go back home to apply to be allowed to return here to do a short course in English. Why? They are here on a tourist visa; they already have a higher status than a student is required to have. Why not make it easy for them? And if they have to prove their ability to speak English, the UK Border Agency does not accept GCSE English as proof of an ability to handle English. There may be good reasons for that—I sometimes have sympathy with that attitude myself—but it seems an extraordinary thing for the Government to do.

I urge my noble friend on the Front Bench to put the economy first. I entirely agree with where we are headed and I am comfortable with that, but I am extremely uncomfortable with the way in which it is being implemented.

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, I am always impressed by the matter of fact approach demonstrated towards these matters by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and I think it is significant that, when the Government are repeatedly telling us that our future depends on the private sector, we are hearing significant voices within the private sector questioning the whole basis of the cap in immigration policy. Either we want to be able to let things grow, or we do not. Some of the people on whom this is dependent are saying, “Be very careful with what you’re doing in immigration policy”.

My noble friend Lord Hunt referred to the very interesting debate that we had last week, and it would be wrong to repeat it all, but one thing that came out of that debate was the realisation that the pressures of migration are not going to reduce. We must be very careful that we do not slip into a kind of “finger in the dyke” syndrome while the dyke is crumbling. In a world in which we emphasise the importance of market, free movement of capital and goods and having international economic policies that facilitate that and strengthen those processes, there is a gigantic flaw in the market if there is not free movement of people. That will, of course, lead particularly to illegal migration—or so-called illegal migration. We have to be very careful about double standards in that regard. I apologise for referring to a point that I made last week, but we regard someone as a social hero in this country who goes off to find a job elsewhere if his community is faced with economic depression, but when in the international market someone does that, they are regarded as somehow a threat. We use disparaging language about them and call them “economic migrants”. It has become almost a term of disparagement. In fact, they may be heroes, if the international market was looked at in a different way.

That is not all. Climate change may make these pressures that we are looking at seem insignificant by comparison in not very many years’ time, because people will be forced to move in very large numbers. Are we preparing for that? Something that we should all take very seriously is that we cannot solve the issues of migration in the context of national policy alone. It is one area in which effective international policies are absolutely crucial. That starts with the European Union, but extends beyond it into the UN system and the wider international community.

I have one other thing to say about context—and I am glad that my noble friend Lord Hunt referred to it. We must realise that so often the most immediate pressures of migration fall on the communities least prepared for it, which are already struggling in terms of jobs, health and education provision, housing and the rest. If we want success in migration policy, we must look to that social and economic investment where the front line of the issue is really to be found.

I am afraid that there is a certain confusion coming from the Government and from different people within the Government. On the one hand, we are hearing that this will all add up to a way of controlling immigration numbers and, on the other hand, we are hearing that it is all about positive integration and making a success of integration. These two arguments are clearly not synonymous and it would be helpful if the Minister could give an authoritative view on how she sees it and what she believes it is all about in that context.

Like other noble Lords, I am sure, I have received very interesting briefing. Some of it comes from an illuminating document from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association. In many ways, the people working in the heat of the situation should have their views reflected in Hansard as they themselves have put them. I shall pick a couple of points from that brief because the people doing this work deserve honest and straightforward answers in the context of the kind of immigration debate that we are having today. The briefing points out that Adrian Blackledge, professor of bilingualism at Birmingham, has noted that,

“there is little evidence that testing English language learners is in itself an effective way to develop linguistic skills. The National Association for Teaching English and other Community Languages to Adults … argue that the UK is the best place for people to learn the English language”.