It was a busy week in Parliament for education last week, with a debate on childcare, and also this one on the impact of immigration policy on higher education. Kezia closed the debate for the Labour Party, and you can see her contribution below and the rest of the debate here.
Kezia Dugdale (Lothian) (Lab): I will be the third person to welcome the tone of the debate. If only the media had taken the same approach, we might have had a different election result last week. Liz Smith was the first to introduce the European election results; Liam McArthur mentioned them in his closing speech, too. We should all unite against UKIP and we should stand up and take it on. The solutions that UKIP puts forward do not stack up when we look at the challenges that the UK faces. I believe UKIP to be a regressive, reactionary and racist force in UK politics. I take some comfort from the fact that the UKIP vote was just 7.7 per cent in Edinburgh, but it was as high as 13.6 per cent in other parts of the country. We have a duty to unite and defeat those arguments and that party with the power of our arguments and the will of our work.
I was pleased that Humza Yousaf mentioned the role of the National Union of Students and the approach that it takes to welcoming international students to our shores. It does not just welcome them; it gives them an active role in the democratic systems that we have in place for student participation in so many of our universities. The NUS leads much of the work around promoting a positive place for international students on our campuses. However, the minister did say that he would come back to the issue of colleges and I do not feel that he did that, so perhaps he will return to it in his closing speech.
The minister was also very gracious to mention the fresh talent initiative. I pay tribute to Jack McConnell’s leadership on that initiative. Jack McConnell’s most successful policy is often viewed as the smoking ban but, when we look behind the scenes, we could argue that the fresh talent initiative was one of the most innovative and progressive things that he did in the sense that it was a long-term policy that displayed a great deal of foresight about the population challenges that we face as a country and addressed them head on, much against the will of quite a right-wing press. We should unite in recognising that.
At the heart of Jack McConnell’s fresh talent initiative was the fundamental acceptance and belief that we could have UK-wide border controls with the flexibility within that system to reflect local and national circumstances. Fresh talent was combined with the wider programme of promoting Scotland overseas. The slogan was
“Now is the time, Scotland is the place”.
Behind that bold slogan, though, was a serious policy and a mechanism to deliver it.
Although we have heard much about the fresh talent initiative, we have not heard much about the relocation advisory service, which underpinned much of the fresh talent work. The service was introduced in 2004, at the same time as the fresh talent initiative, and was funded by the Scottish Government as part of the initiative. The Scottish Government continued to fund the service when fresh talent was absorbed into the UK Labour Government’s plans around tier 1 post-study visa schemes. The Scottish Government continued to support the service because it offered a one-stop-shop information advisory service for people looking to study, live and work in Scotland.
The relocation advisory service also worked with employers to provide advice and assistance when companies were looking to recruit staff from overseas. People could do that using the website www.scotlandistheplace.com. That website is no longer operational. In 2012, the Scottish Government restructured, and the relocation advisory service was subsumed into TalentScotland, a Scottish Enterprise initiative. On the TalentScotland website there is nothing like the same degree of work, information and services that the relocation advisory service offered. It is important that we recognise that.
There was also the one Scotland, many cultures campaign, which ran from 2002 to 2008-09. Earlier today, I asked SPICe to tell me whether there were any equivalent schemes now. It told me that there is no current anti-racism media campaign in Scotland but that marketing activity on equality issues is planned for later this year.
It is important to recognise those two factors because, as much as I agree with a lot of what Humza Yousaf has said today, if he is going to apportion blame, he has to look at his own record on the issue. The one Scotland, many cultures campaign and the relocation advisory service have disappeared. He would be in a stronger position today if he had maintained those services.
We have heard a lot about statistics today. I heard Stewart Maxwell say that the number of non-EU students studying in Scotland was decreasing. I am afraid that that is incorrect. I have the tables from the Higher Education Statistics Agency here, which show that the number of non-EU students studying in Scotland has increased every year from 2008 to the present day. In fact, in the past year it has increased by 11 per cent, which is double the UK-wide figure of 5 per cent. Stewart Maxwell is shaking his head—I would be happy to provide the HESA tables to him after the debate.
We agree with the minister that the current Tory-Lib Dem Government immigration policy poses a significant threat to our universities. The weight of concern from the universities sector is considerable. The minister will have more success in uniting the chamber if he does not overegg it, but I am afraid that his use of statistics today suggests that he might be doing that.
Although I have proved to the minister that the number of international students in higher education is increasing, the number in colleges is decreasing. In fact, it is half what it was when the minister’s party came into power in 2007. In 2008-09, Motherwell College had a progressive approach to attracting international students. It had one dedicated member of staff in China, specifically to attract Chinese students to study at the college. We are calling on the Government today to consider more of that type of work.
There are other issues behind the statistics, because we do not know the full impact of what they tell us. We do not know what percentage of international students remain in Scotland after they complete their studies or how many want to stay and draw on policies such as the post-study work visa programme. We do not know how many people want to stay long term and become resident in Scotland. We would be in a much better place if we had that information today.
We have talked a lot about countries from which the number of students coming to Scotland has fallen. India has been mentioned several times, and Jim Eadie mentioned the impact that that drop in numbers is having on the University of Edinburgh. I asked SPICe about that particular trend today and was told that a contributing factor to a reduction in the number of Indian students coming to study in Scotland is a massive and rapid expansion in the Indian higher education sector. Fewer Indian students are coming to Scotland because the university sector is growing there and Indian students are choosing to stay and study in India. I am not going to suggest that that is the whole reason for the reduction in numbers, but it is worth putting the situation into context.
I add that the number of students coming from China is going up, while the number coming from the USA and Canada is staying broadly the same.
My colleague Neil Bibby was absolutely right to introduce the rest-of-the-UK fees issue into the debate. I encourage all SNP members to look at the SPICe briefing, which shows that the white paper proposal is not legal. It is very clear that that is the case, and I refer them to the fourth point in that briefing, which says quite clearly—
Jim Eadie: Will the member take an intervention?
The Deputy Presiding Officer: The member is in her last minute.
Kezia Dugdale: I am sorry to hear that; I would have very much welcomed the opportunity to hear from Jim Eadie on that point. However, I encourage him to look at the SPICe briefing.
Neil Bibby was also correct to raise research council grants. I point Christina McKelvie to some of the facts. She suggested that grants were allocated on merit, not geography. UK research councils fund UK institutions. If we are not part of the United Kingdom, we will not have access to those funds—it really is that simple.
We cannot accept the SNP’s position because it implies that only independence would deliver a more progressive immigration policy. That is demonstrably not the case, as Jack McConnell proved. We cannot support the Tory or the Lib Dem amendments because we cannot endorse the UK Government’s immigration policy.