Blake Stephenson, MP for Mid Bedfordshire, said the government was “acting without sense and rationale” by pressing ahead with plans for a government SELT – known as the HOELT – to be fully remote.
“Remote tests are extremely vulnerable to organised criminal gangs and cheats who, as I have seen at first hand, can easily overcome safeguards with technological workarounds, some of which use cheap equipment readily available on Amazon,” he said during a debate in the House of Commons on June 3.
He suggested the government was “opening a new backdoor to Britain for organised criminals to exploit”.
Remote tests are extremely vulnerable to organised criminal gangs and cheats who, as I have seen at first hand, can easily overcome safeguards with technological workarounds
Blake Stephenson, MP for Mid Bedfordshire
“We do not permit remote-only testing for driving theory tests, “Life in the UK” tests or GCSEs,” he added. “So how can we, with a clear conscience, permit it for the test that decides who makes the UK their home?”
Labour MP Daniel Zeichner also questioned the approach, asking whether a fully remote test could match the security of in-person, supervised testing”.
It follows the IELTS consortium’s shock, and very public, withdrawal from the HOELT tender in March, citing security concerns after the Home Office said it was looking to commission a test that was remote-by-default.
The PIE understands that several leading testing providers are still in the running to win the £816 million contract.
However, it remains unknown when the official HOELT provider will be revealed – or, indeed, whether the Home Office will keep to the current system, where no one test has an official government endorsement.
MPs also debated the quality of some international students in the UK during the Parliamentary session.
Stephenson asserted, much to the disagreement of several other MPs, that “far from attracting the best and the brightest, the visa system fails to distinguish between the quality of students”.
While he agreed with MP for Edinburgh South West Scott Arthur that the UK is home to many excellent universities, he claimed that many international students were coming to the UK to attend “poorly performing universities”.
“That is doing long-term harm to our country and our economy. We must close down that route by establishing a minimum academic standard for incoming students and setting a cap on institutions, based on the quality of educational provision,” he suggested.
He mooted a system where graduate visas should only be open to the “best and brightest” students, “while slamming closed this back-door route for low-skilled migrants”.
And he stressed that universities should “not be allowed to mark their own homework” and therefore be disallowed from using their own systems for testing international students’ English language skills.
Zeichner, meanwhile, pointed out that universities in his Cambridge constituency had “fantastic universities that rely strongly on international students, who we are very proud of”.
But he said that many people in his constituency had faced delays in the immigration system “and, I have to say, sometimes limited communication with the Home Office”.
“It is hardly a new problem. I have been an MP for 11 years and it has always been the case,” he added.
Meanwhile, SNP minister Pete Wishart hit back at the notion that net migration was still a significant problem in the UK, pointing out that this is currently at one of its lowest points since 2012.
“All we hear, from what can only be described as a Westminster consensus, is that there is a crisis around immigration and a perception that it is out of control and must be curbed,” he said.
But actual net migration figures “do not seem to matter a jot to a government and opposition still trying to convince us, for what I can perceive only as political reasons and purposes, that immigration is out of control”, he said.
He added: “The Home Office is happy to continue to paint a picture of escalating migration, and therefore tackling immigration is the core mission for all its activities.”
The Home Office is happy to continue to paint a picture of escalating migration, and therefore tackling immigration is the core mission for all its activities
Pete Wishart, MP for Perth and Kinross-shire
Parliamentary under-secretary of state for migration and citizenship Mike Tapp said that the Labour government continues to “welcome and value” international students.
“We have the best universities in the world, and we want the best minds in every country to aspire to complete their education here,” he added.
And he said that it was important for the government to work with universities on a compliance system that worked but still attracted “the greatest minds to our country”.
“Abuse on that route is down by 30% since we came into government, but last year we still saw 11,000 individuals enter on the student route and go on to claim asylum,” he said.
It comes as UK universities face tightened compliance restrictions, rating them on a sliding scale based on visa refusal, course completion and attendance metrics.
The more stringent Basic Compliance Assessment (BCA) measures come amid a rise in visa refusals – with many institutions complaining of an opaque and arbitrary decision-making process from the UKVI.
An ongoing PIE News investigation shows the real cost of the system, with the Home Office raking in some £9.4m in visa fees from refused students in the past 12 months alone.
Meanwhile, some universities with policies not to refund tuition fee deposits are continuing to issue CASs to students from high-risk markets despite their high risk of being refused a visa.
In-country agents are bearing the brunt of disgruntled students’ concerns, with one prominent agency telling The PIE of an incident where a student who had lost their deposit brought a gun to one of its offices in Pakistan.
