With just days to go before the holiday season is upon us, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has set out six pledges that he hopes to achieve by 2029.
This is when the next general election is expected to be called in the UK. The Prime Minister has framed these targets as “milestones” intended to help the British people judge his government on whether it meets its ambitions in each of these six areas.
The Prime Minister’s targets include raising living standards, building more homes, ending hospital backlogs, increasing police presence in local communities, raising early years attainment and moving to majority clean energy sources.
While broad in nature, the targets are nevertheless attracting attention more for what they omit rather than contain. This is because immigration does not feature anywhere among Sir Keir Starmer’s list of measurable milestones.
Global Britain?
In recent years, migration has become a divisive issue in UK politics. In the four years from 2019, net migration statistics have quadrupled. Almost one million people came to Britain in the year ending June 2023. Still counted among these statistics are growing numbers of international students and their dependants.
Despite the previous government removing the right to bring dependants for one-year Master’s students and increasing health and visa surcharges earlier this year, anger over rising migration figures undoubtedly played a part in bringing down Rishi Sunak’s government in the July 2024 UK general election. It was also a source of gains in the polls for the Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage.
With future votes at stake, then, Sir Keir Starmer knows he cannot appear soft on immigration. Yet, the extent to which he intends to bring net migration levels down remains unclear.
While immigration targets may be absent from the Prime Minister’s pre-Christmas wish list, he nevertheless committed the week previously to a new “plan to reduce immigration”. This includes cracking down on the “abuse of visa routes” and finding “clear evidence of the sectors that are over reliant on immigration”.
Waiting game
For UK universities, the waiting game continues to find out what this means in practice. It is no secret that the UK higher education sector has become increasingly reliant on international student income as institutional finances wane.
This reliance has also already been put to the test as recent changes to immigration rules led to a slump in international student visa applications. Although the new education secretary Bridget Phillipson issued a much-needed welcoming message to international students over the summer, her words were carefully caveated to those who “meet the criteria for entering the UK on a student visa”. This does not mean that these criteria are not at risk of change.
If, for example, the UK higher education sector is found to be one of those overly reliant on immigration as part of the Prime Minister’s forthcoming review, there are no guarantees that measures won’t be considered to reduce international student in-flows further.
After all, when it comes to the hierarchy of Whitehall, it is the Home Office that calls the shots, no matter how well intentioned the education secretary’s words may be.
Whitehall tug of war
As we head into the New Year and all eyes start to turn to the spending review, one thing is for sure: the Department for Education (DfE) is going to need some powerful friends across Whitehall to make the case for the status quo in international education policy. Its best hope may well come in the form of the Treasury as the other major office of state with both skin in the game when it comes to international education and the ear of Number 10.
While reducing net migration may be a top priority for the new Labour government, so too is achieving growth. Following her recent Budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves will be eager to maximise economic returns to show her fiscal plan is working. Education exports could prove a key asset for the Treasury in this regard, so the DfE and universities would do well to mobilise Treasury support early in the process of developing any new iteration of the UK international education strategy.
The internal government battle for the future direction of UK international education policy is therefore shaping up to be a tug of war between the Home Office and the Treasury. While the DfE may find itself stuck in the middle and pulled in both directions, UK universities have a golden window to choose its allies well.
With the Treasury looking for economic gains, the task for UK universities is to show both the DfE and the Home Office that these can be balanced against concerns over quality and overburdening local services. If we fail, then we risk looking at a much bleaker future for our country’s international education ambitions.
