Rishi Sunak plans crackdown on student visa salesmen

Rishi Sunak is expected to announce a crackdown on agents that market graduate visa schemes overseas as he attempts to appear tough on migration before this year’s general election.

In a week where the university’s regulator warned institutions are in dire financial positions because of falling international student levels, the prime minister is seeking ways to cut the number of people coming to study in the UK further.

Sunak could announce the new measures as early as next week, to coincide with quarterly migration data from the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics, according to people briefed on the plans.

The crackdown on agents could include some kind of mandatory agent registration scheme, and see the government introduce fines for bad practice.

However, the prime minister is also mulling going further by adapting the current graduate scheme so that visas are only offered to the “best and the brightest”, allies of the prime minister said, though ministers have not yet had formal discussions about this approach.

This move is being heavily resisted by other members of his cabinet including chancellor Jeremy Hunt and education secretary Gillian Keegan over concerns that a further fall in migrant students will hammer the sector’s already-squeezed finances.

The decision on whether to curtail the scheme to allow in only the “best and the brightest” is likely to hinge on whether net migration figures have fallen, and will probably come later, according to people briefed on the prime minister’s thinking.

Keegan, who took an employer-backed apprenticeship degree at Liverpool John Moores University, is understood to support measures that would stamp out alleged “abuse” in the system by agents marketing the scheme on behalf of universities.

But she is resistant to any moves that would limit access to the scheme based on the quality of the students, or the degrees they are taking. “This can’t all be about PPEs from Oxford,” she told colleagues.

Earlier this week, the UK government’s independent adviser on migration found categorically that the visa scheme — which allows international students to remain for two years after graduating — should remain in place in its current form. 

Sunak is planning to announce measures to curtail access to the scheme, which officials say will include a crackdown on international agents, as he faces pressure from the right of his party to reduce legal migration ahead of the general election later this year. 

As it trails the opposition Labour party in the polls, Sunak’s ruling Conservative party is seeking to look tough on issues it believes cut through to voters.

This week’s report by the Migration Advisory Committee did find some evidence that unscrupulous recruitment agents hired by universities were mis-selling courses, and that these should be subject to tighter regulation.

Requiring universities to publish data on their spend on international recruitment agents, and the establishment of a mandatory registration system, would help, it suggested.

One Sunak ally said the prime minister was interested in going further and crafting something along the lines of the existing ‘High Potential Individual’ scheme, which allows graduates from the top 50 universities globally to come to the UK for two years without being sponsored by an employer.

Iain Mansfield, head of education at the Policy Exchange think-tank, said that one option would be to award graduate visas only to those attending ‘high tariff’ universities — the third of universities that require the highest grades to enter and on which the government already collects regularly updated data. 

Yet universities and businesses are urging Sunak not to go too far, and argue that the focus on the “best and the brightest” is entirely misplaced.

Lord Jo Johnson, former Conservative universities minister, said: “Clearly there is a growing risk that the government looks detached from reality in pursuing a narrowly party political and non-evidence-based assault on one of the UK’s few globally competitive sectors.”