Thursday 22 April 2004

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 issuing visas only to students attending accredited colleges. In the mean time, 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 to empower registrars to refuse to conduct a marriage that 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 countermeasures 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.

EGAA

We will also be looking at the rules and practices for ECAA applications from the remaining countries that 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 mean time, ECAA applications from Romania and Bulgaria continue to be suspended.

The Statement on the 2004 Budget of the European Communities (EC Budget), entitled European Community Finances (Cm 6134), has today been laid before Parliament. This White Paper is the 24th in the series. As in the past, it covers annual budgetary matters and includes details of recent developments in European Community financial management arid in countering fraud against the EC Budget. It also describes the EC Budget for 2004 as adopted by the European Parliament, and details the United Kingdom's gross and net contributions to the EC Budget for calendar years 1998 to 2004 and financial years 1998–99 to 2005–06.

7. Achieve an ROCE of at least 3.5 per cent and an MoD dividend of £3 million¹ .

¹ In addition to the 2004–05 ROCE target of at least 3.5 per cent, Dstl will aim to achieve a ROCE of at least 3.5 per cent averaged across the period 2004–05 to 2008–09, as agreed with HM Treasury.

I am pleased to be able to announce that we will be buying 64 Tomahawk land attack missiles from the United States under the terms of a foreign military sales case. These are conventionally armed land attack missiles. These new missiles will be to higher—block IV—specification than our existing block III missiles. As such, they will provide the ability to retarget or abort a mission in-flight and will also provide battle damage indication. They will be capable of being fired from our current Trafalgar class submarines as well as from our new Astute class submarines when they enter service.

This decision shows our continued commitment to enabling precision attack at long range against selected targets.