Tom Campbell is a BOP associate and the former cultural strategy manager for the Mayor of London. In this guest post he argues that the creative sector needs to pay much more attention to the imminent changes in student visa rules.
The controversies over the government’s changes to the funding of higher education (HE) and the introduction of variable tuition fees have meant that the creative sector has so far paid little attention to another, arguably more sinister, threat. It has long been recognised that one of the great strengths of the UK’s creative economy has been its HE sector – its specialist universities, art and design colleges and conservatoires. It is to these institutions that some of the most talented individuals in the world have flocked, studying and researching in creative disciplines ranging from computer animation to jewellery design. London’s HE institutions alone currently have some 100,000 overseas students, equivalent to around £2bn a year in export earnings.
All of this is now under threat from new Home Office immigration regulations. As of April this year, new rules will end the right of non-EU students to stay on and work after completing their studies. Previously, students were automatically eligible to apply for a two-year work visa. From April, they will instead have to return as soon as they have completed their studies, taking their talents, intellectual property and entrepreneurial energies with them.
It matters little if these reforms have been made willingly or, as many suspect, by reluctant government ministers fearful of colleagues on the backbenches. Either way, the consequences are likely to be dire. Universities themselves, trying to attract students in an ever more competitive global market, fear a large drop in overseas applications. Those who do still come will no longer be able to stay and apply their talents in a commercial environment to the benefit of the UK. Nor will they be able to establish exactly the kinds of business relationships that UK firms need if they are to prosper in overseas markets. Instead, all of those designers, architects, computer scientists and film-makers will be immediately going back to North America, China, India, Brazil and elsewhere to develop their careers, establish world-beating firms and boost their domestic economies.
For London in particular, a city whose wealth is partly based on successive waves of immigrants and which claims to be the pre-eminent world creative capital, it is hard to think of a policy more likely to bleed it of talent and enterprise. And for a government with much-vaunted ambitions for re-balancing the national economy and growing through international markets and knowledge-intensive sectors, the new immigration rules are not just a glaring instance of incoherence, but a senseless and damaging own goal.
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