What’s the progress of the immigration white paper proposals?

Last week’s international student fee levy news might make you wonder what’s going on with all the other measures that the Home Office sprang on the sector in May’s white paper.

Five months on, there’s been no further news on the reduction of the graduate route to 18 months – nor written confirmation that it will only apply to master’s level students. At the time the sensible assumption was that this would apply from January, but it’s hard to know whether this is still likely. There’s certainly plenty of behind-the-scenes lobbying going on to emphasise – rightly – that this is now too soon to make a change, given that students are already applying. The question of whether the change will apply to students starting courses, or graduating from them, is also an open question, with all the issues around unfairness we’ve gone over before.

Westminster returns from conference recess next week, so we should expect a statement of changes to the immigration rules very soon. In theory at least, this should also see an annual uprating of student visa proof of funds requirements to “match” the current maximum student maintenance award for home students. In the run-up to the white paper’s publication – though not really in the thing itself – we heard that the government was planning to change how financial requirements were monitored and enforced, with a shift to “reviewing the finances of foreign students throughout their stay in the UK” (as The Times was told). There’s been no further news here since.

On the serious tightening of the screw around UKVI basic compliance assessments, which has already been changing recruitment behaviour in some institutions, there have been some developments. As Universities UK International’s most recent newsletter puts it:

Through sustained engagement, the Home Office has committed to phased implementation of the new thresholds, alongside discretionary exceptions for smaller providers and for institutions that would have passed under current rules.

So it’s a win for the sector there – but longer term the pressures of the new thresholds remain. The white paper also promised to institute a public red-amber-green rating for student sponsors’ compliance with UKVI rules. UUK’s submission to the House of Commons Education Committee inquiry called for this to be kept private:

UUK believe a banding system, used internally, could be helpful in enabling earlier interventions with sponsors before a threshold is breached. A public list, however, creates significant reputational risk for the UK HE sector as a whole and could be misunderstood by banks and sponsoring bodies, affecting students’ ability to secure finance or visas even where no formal action has been taken against the institution concerned.

It’s unclear whether the government will stick to its guns here – willingness to compromise over the BCA implementation suggests perhaps not, and it’s never been fully clear what the Home Office was hoping to achieve with the proposal.

The wider technocratic justification for some of the white paper’s proposals was about linking skills and migration, and establishing levers to connect the domestic labour market with international demand. Anyone who’s been looking out for work from the Labour Market Evidence Group – the cross-government group tasked with achieving this join-up – over the last few months will have struggled to find anything concrete (with the exception of one part of it being moved inside another). It sounded nice on paper, but whether it’s really a long-term policy approach remains very much to be seen.

The other student visa-related idea in the white paper was for sponsoring institutions who want to request a larger CAS allocation to “demonstrate that they are considering local impacts when taking its decision on international recruitment.” Nothing further has been said here yet either.