Examination of Witnesses

Part of Immigration Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 10:45 am on 29 October 2013.

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Sir Andrew Green: That is very reassuring. Chairman, may I make a major point that has not come out in the discussion so far? It is to do with the rate of inflow. How important is that? Mr Hanson asked about the total number and we discussed that.

There is another issue as to how big inflow is. Is it something we need to worry about? Of course, almost by definition it is hard to know. I would say that if you look at the international passenger survey, which records only those people who say that they are going to stay for a year or more, so they are legal on arrival, for citizens from outside the European Union that has been running at 300,000 a year for the past eight or 10 years. If you look at departures, it is 100,000.

Somewhere there are 200,000 people a year who need to be accounted for. Some of those will have extended entirely legally. Some will have married. You used to be able to go from a work permit to settlement and so on. Part of that will be those who have managed to transfer to a legal position to stay here. Another part will be people who have extended their visas, but you cannot extend them for ever. We are looking at a pretty substantial number who have come in legally and for some reason have not gone.

Our view is that a major part of that is students who have overstayed, and there is quite substantial evidence in that respect. The National Audit Office inquiry found that 40,000 to 50,000 students from the Indian subcontinent had come for reasons other than study in the first year of the points-based system. There have been other studies.

The most recent information was from August, when we found that only 50,000 students had left, while the average arrivals in the past five years have been 150,000. Now, those are all issues that will be further investigated as we have more years’ statistics and more detail. The Committee should be in no doubt that we are talking about a substantial annual increase in the number of people remaining in Britain illegally, plus those who enter illegally in the first place.