Leading Tory thinker Nick Boles has challenged the government’s immigration cap, arguing that the policy threatens the ability of Britain’s universities to contribute to economic growth.

Speaking in an interview with CSW, Boles argued that foreign students should be exempted from the cap, and instead asked to pay a deposit which would be returned when they leave the country at the end of their course. Public opinion on immigration is “quite sophisticated: people don’t object to [immigrants] who come here to work hard and pay tax,” said Boles, arguing that the British only resent those who abuse the visa system in search of low-skilled jobs.

“So let’s have a cap on what people actually care about, and then let the university sector – which is probably one of our best growth opportunities – take as many foreign students as it possibly can,” he said.

Boles is a former head of the Conservative Party’s implementation team and the founder of influential think tank Policy Exchange; elected to Parliament in 2010, he is very close to top ministers.

In a speech he gave to the Tory Reform Group just before his CSW interview, Boles said: “Instead of counting all new students coming to the UK as immigrants for the purpose of our measure of net immigration, we should only count those students staying on to work here after their studies are complete. Student visa numbers should be removed from the immigration cap”. Asked by CSW whether he’d run this idea past the PM, Boles replied that he had warned Number 10 that he’d be making the argument.
In his CSW interview, Boles also discussed his management of the pre-election meetings between Tory shadow ministers and permanent secretaries; the coalition partners’ surprising poll ratings; the “hard” battle to win support for the introduction of city mayors in the forthcoming local referendums; and his views and impressions of the civil service. “I would put myself firmly in the radical camp on civil service reform,” he said.

For the full interview.

Written by Matt Ross