Immigration: Earned Settlement
I thank the Home Secretary for advance sight of her statement. It took a year for the Home Secretary to build her reputation as tough on immigration, but what took a year to build she has just dismantled in 12 short minutes. I do not judge her by the actions we think she should take; I judge her by what she herself has previously said. She made announcements from the Government Dispatch Box on 20 November last year, and doubled down in a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research on 5 March this year. She repeatedly singled out social care workers as a particular problem. She said on 5 March that fraud in the social care sector was “rife”, with bogus sponsors. She said from the Government Dispatch Box that it was right that “more stringent” restrictions should be applied to social care workers. Now, she stands there and says the exact opposite. A Home Office document that the Home Secretary published on 5 March said that social care workers alone, because they work on low wages and have brought in many dependants, will cost the taxpayer £10 billion. Those are her figures about social care workers that she specifically chose to publish. She went on to say on 5 March that failing to implement her plans would be “an affront to the idea of fairness” in our society. That is exactly what she has done in the changes she has announced today. The Home Secretary now proposes to allow every single care worker and their dependants who arrived prior to May 2025—a number running into hundreds of thousands—to stay in this country beyond the expiry of their visa and, in the case of 75% of them, to stay permanently, even though she acknowledges that many of them arrived fraudulently. How can she justify allowing people who she acknowledges arrived in this country fraudulently to stay forever, at a cost that she herself has admitted is £10 billion? That is the cost of today’s U-turn: £10 billion. Outside of care workers, many of the so-called highly skilled workers who have arrived recently are not highly skilled at all. The Home Secretary did not mention this in her statement, but in her document she proposes to extend the soft terms on which those workers can stay until 2035, extending the previous sunset by five years. <span id="587" class="column-number" data-column-number="587"></span>Her own document published today, which she did not refer to, forecasts that a staggering 1.9 million permanent settlement rights will be granted between now and 2030, and a freedom of information request has revealed where some of those people work. German Doner Kebab, a chain of kebab shops, sponsored 106 skilled worker visas. Khans middle eastern restaurant sponsored 28 high-skilled visas. A Domino’s Pizza franchise in South Yorkshire sponsored 78 high-skilled visas—Members get the picture. Just a year after getting ILR, someone can easily get full citizenship, and we know what that means: benefits, social housing, and free NHS treatment. <em>[Interruption.] </em>When the Home Secretary said in March that failing to implement her changes would be an affront, she was right, but now she has done exactly that. She also plans to give illegal immigrants who have arrived on small boats ILR and citizenship. We disagree with that. Why has the Home Secretary made those changes? It is because the Housing Secretary—who I notice has run out of the Chamber—the Energy Secretary and the Labour open-borders left oppose what she previously announced. The Home Secretary is no longer running the Government’s immigration policy—the Housing Secretary is—and her position is looking increasingly untenable. The Home Secretary has done no better with her announcements last year than Keir Starmer did with his welfare announcements, and we know what happened to him. We would go a lot further than the Home Secretary’s previous announcements, although they were a good start. If she wants to implement them in full, we will vote for them, because mass low-skilled migration must end. Those people who came here on a temporary visa and are working in low-skilled, low-wage jobs must leave when their temporary visa expires. We cannot allow them to stay forever, claiming benefits and social housing, yet that is what the proposals today will allow to happen. Ten billion pounds—that is the cost of today’s U-turn. To those who ask where we will find the workers, I say there are 9 million economically inactive adults in this country. Thanks to this Labour Government’s high-tax, high-regulation policies, there are now a million young people not in education, employment or training. If the Government had the courage to toughen up the welfare system, we would get some of those people into work, instead of relying on mass low-skill migration. If the Home Secretary wants to face down her nemesis, the Communities Secretary, and implement her own plans, we will vote for them. However, if she capitulates to the open borders left, her credibility as Home Secretary will not recover.