Students

The Government will establish a list of accredited private colleges. Discussions are already well advanced with the British Council and others on accreditation of English language schools. We will establish a scheme to broaden this to other colleges.

By the end of the year we will be in a position of only issuing visas to students attending accredited colleges. In the meantime, where there are doubts about whether a college not on the list is bona fide, applications will be put on hold while the Home Office investigates them. An urgent programme of such investigations will begin next week.

We will be consulting on introducing a requirement for all educational institutions to notify the Home Office where a foreign student does not enrol, or enrols and then disappears.

We will also step up enforcement. This will include targeted multi-agency enforcement operations to disrupt proprietors of sham institutions and remove illegal staff and/or students. We will create more Risk Assessment Units in Embassies abroad to work alongside entry clearance staff and improve the flow of intelligence on fraud and abuse.

We will consult on a requirement on foreign students to demonstrate self-sufficiency, and ability to meet the financial requirements of the course before granting entry clearance.

Marriage

I am announcing today that we will legislate to restrict the capacity to authorise marriages involving foreign nationals from outside the EEA to a number of designated register offices. We are consulting with registrars about the most effective means of doing so. This will enable expertise to be built up on abuse and mean that we can focus our enforcement efforts. Clearly not all marriages involving foreign nationals present the same level of risk in terms of immigration abuse: for example, foreign nationals who have been resident here for many years. We will be working with registrars to refine our proposals to achieve the necessary balance between facilitating the vast majority of genuine applicants and protecting the system from abuse.

We will also consult on making further changes to the marriage laws to reinforce these proposals, including empowering registrars to refuse to conduct a marriage they suspect is being carried out for the purposes of illegal immigration, until it has been properly investigated by the immigration authorities.

The Government will underpin these changes through a better co-ordinated intelligence-led focus on marriage abuse supported by an effective enforcement response where cases of abuse are detected.

In the coming months there will be a major new enforcement effort targeting sham marriages and those who organise them with the aim of arresting those engaged in such marriages and, where appropriate, prosecuting the organised criminality behind them.

We are strengthening current arrangements for joint working between caseworkers and immigration officers to ensure a better focus on analysing intelligence, and more effective following up reports, for example from Registrars about suspicious marriages.

We will set up a joint working group between the Home Office and Registrars to share intelligence and enable the enforcement effort and other counter-measures to be better targeted.

Quota-Based Schemes

The temporary quota based schemes for the hospitality and food processing industries are due to be reviewed at the end of May in the light of EU enlargement. I have also ordered a review of the quota based scheme for agricultural workers, for the same reason—around a third of these places were filled last year by nationals of the new EU accession states.

I have decided that in consultation with industry, we will at the end of May be setting reduced quotas for these schemes to reflect the fact that from 1 May accession nationals will be able to come and work through the planned workers registration scheme. We will be able to take account of early information from the registration scheme in revising the quotas.

We will at the same time review control of both schemes.

ECAA

We will also be looking at the rules and practices for ECAA applications, from the remaining countries who will be covered by that scheme after 1 May, taking account of the outcome of the investigation, which Ken Sutton is undertaking, of procedures for dealing with ECAA applications in Bulgaria and Romania. In the meantime, ECAA applications from Romania and Bulgaria continue to be suspended.

Since that announcement, I have been approached by a number of key representative interests who have argued that the original proposal did not adequately reflect the extent of the different land types in England. They have requested a further division of land in England that would identify moorland within the SDA as a separate region. They argued that this would more closely reflect land conditions and productive capacity and, therefore, current subsidy payments.

I have given careful consideration to those representations and to others which have argued for alternative solutions. However the further refinement of a moorland line within the SDA was ultimately the proposal of all the main representative bodies.

One of the purposes of setting the regional boundaries as proposed was to provide some limitation on the redistributive effects of the move to the new flat rate single payment. I accept that the boundaries as announced might have resulted in redistribution of subsidy away from more productive SDA land to less productive moorland. I have therefore decided to amend the regional boundaries as announced on 12 February.

The regions in England will now comprise the moorland within the upland SDA; the rest of the upland SDA; and all land outside the upland SDA. The upland SDA comprises all the areas classified in accordance with Article 3(4) of Directive 75, 268/EEC. It does not include the Isles of Scilly which were classified as a less favoured area in accordance with Article 3(5) of that Directive.

In selecting moorland in the SDA as one of the regions, I am aware that it is possible that there may be some minor inaccuracies in the location of the boundary at certain points. I am therefore considering whether and what practical arrangements can be made for consideration of representations on this issue as part of the arrangements for the introduction of the new scheme. I will make a further statement on this at an early date.

I recognise that this decision to amend the regional boundaries may come as a disappointment to some. Although there will be farmers in the SDA who will gain from this decision, some others, particularly those within the moorland line, will see payments at a lower level than would have been the case under the original announcement, and in some cases less than their coupled historic receipts.

We will need to see that hill farming communities receive appropriate support from other sources, including the England rural development programme. The hill farm allowance scheme will continue to operate for the remainder of the current England rural development programme (up to the end of 2006). In addition, I want to ensure that farms in the uplands have a full opportunity to be rewarded for improved environmental management of their land, including through agri-environment schemes. I have therefore asked my officials to consider how the next round of rural development programming (from 2007 onwards), can better reflect the needs of upland communities, and the public interest in good management of some of our best-loved landscapes.