After ten months in office, Keir Starmer has promised to ‘finally take back control’ of migration – but what’s his record so far? We don’t yet have the key figure for net migration (that’s due in ten days’ time), but other more timely data shows that the Prime Minister is failing to live up to promises he made before the election.
This failure is most obvious on small boats. Starmer said he would ‘smash the gangs’ to stop small boat crossings. It hasn’t worked: record numbers are crossing the Channel. Some 11,574 people have made the journey so far this year, 25 per cent more than in the same period last year. Since the general election, just under 35,000 small boat migrants have arrived.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced this weekend that the health and care worker visa will be closed to reduce the number of low-skilled and care workers coming to the country by 50,000 over the next year. Until now, Labour has largely continued Rishi Sunak’s policies to cut the numbers (after the Tories enabled their enormous rise) by increasing compliance checks on sponsoring firms, making them try to recruit in England first, restricting dependants and raising salary thresholds.
Under Cooper, the Home Office has released regular updates on numbers of enforced and voluntary returns, deportation flights, and foreign criminals deported. The number of returns has increased, but the latest figures suggest that the rate of removals is no longer accelerating and remains below the level under the last Labour government.
The number of foreign national offenders who haven't been deported has continued to climb.
Public concern over migration has continued to rise. YouGov polling says the proportion of Brits who think immigration and asylum is one of the most important issues facing the country is up from 41 per cent before the election to 48 per cent. This is behind only the economy as the most important issue. Seven in ten voters think migration has been too high over the last ten years.
Starmer said he’s making the changes announced today because migration control is a ‘core Labour value’, not because of Reform’s triumph in the local elections. But attitudes to immigration were a big contributor to Reform’s success. A third of the party's voters said they wanted to ‘send a message to the Labour party’ and two-thirds said they were voting Reform because of national policies on immigration. Will today’s changes be enough to stop voters migrating from Labour to Reform?
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