Changes to immigration rules represent breathtaking thoughtlessness over student poverty

Back in May, as part of the package of measures designed to reassure surrounding the government’s decision to not scrap the graduate route visa, we learned that the government was finally getting around to reviewing the maintenance requirement.

This is the requirement that student applicants demonstrate they have funds to support themselves for each month of their course (up to nine months).

The problem is that it hasn’t been uprated since 2020. And from what I can make out, there’s been quite a bit of inflation since then.

If £9,207 (or £12,006 in London) was enough to live on for nine months back in 2020, if we applied CPI to it the figure would now be £11,331 (London £14,775).

But there’s a problem.

The level of funds for international students to demonstrate was originally matched with the maintenance loans available for home students.

And so delivering on its promise, UKVI has not uprated the maintenance figure for inflation. It has uprated the figure to match the coming year’s maximum student loan for home students in England.

As a result the new figures are £10,224 (ie £1,136 a month) or £13,347 (ie £1,483) in London.

In other words, the Home Office has taken the Department for Education’s dismal failure to correct its errors in predicting rates of inflation and decided to spread the pain that causes to home students onto international students.

You’ll note it’s not decided to use the calculation made by their friends in the Foreign Office, who last year calculated the stipend levels it would be giving Chevening Scholars as (excluding extras for partners, arrival, children and an allowance for “warm clothes”) to be £1,180 a month – and students got at least 12 months, so £14,160 as compared to the (max) £9,978 an undergraduate from England could pull down.

And the worst bit?

We will ensure it aligns with home students’ maintenance loans in future.

This might be OK were it not for the fact that a whole host of universities’ own cost of living webpages imply that the figure is enough to live on. It isn’t.

It’s hardly as if agents are incentivised to tell the truth (accuracy over such matters is not even a bullet point in the so-called Agent “Quality” Framework) and so you end up with a trifecta of inadequate pricing signals – ones that push international students into poverty and a part of the economy where they are paid cash in hand and have no rights, given that there’s a strict limit on working hours.

This is why international students are major users of food banks, this is why international students are crying out for further instalments, this is why securing attendance from international students if often so tricky, and this is why the “warm words” on “welcoming” international students mean nothing if they feel lied to when they get here.

There are some inside universities that might look at this and think “thank God, asking for more would put applicants off”. If you’re not one of those people, you should get onto your MP or Seema Malhotra (Minister for Migration and Citizenship at the Home Office) and demand a change.

And if you’re one of the universities whose websites still imply that the maintenance limit is enough to live on in the UK – you know what to do next. In big letters.