Forthcoming White Paper will detail how the Government will reduce immigration and tackle skills shortages
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper appeared before the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee earlier this month to give evidence on the work of the Home Office, including immigration and related policy challenges.
Image credit: WikipediaPaul Kohler MP questioned how the Government plans to reconcile reducing immigration with the need for economic growth. In response, Cooper acknowledged the historical importance of immigration to the UK's economy but emphasised the need for a managed system that addresses current challenges. She said the quadrupling of net migration under the previous Conservative government, with a "huge increase" in overseas recruitment and a trebling of work visas, was "completely the wrong approach".
The Home Secretary told the Committee: "I think we also have to have stronger visa controls in place. The policies that were introduced by the previous Government after the implementation of Brexit ended up with things like a 20% discount for wages for overseas recruitment. I think that was completely the wrong approach. It encouraged undercutting. It was an incentive for overseas recruitment rather than an incentive to recruit or train in the UK. Also, the salary threshold was not increased for a very long time."
Cooper said the Home Office plans to publish a White Paper in the new year detailing how the Government will reduce immigration, including strategies for workforce planning in sectors like social care. Cooper emphasised the need for fair pay agreements and robust training programmes as part of a broader workforce strategy.
"We must have a proper, medium-term strategy for sectors instead of what, to me, just felt like what we ended up with was almost a free market approach to the labour market and to migration, which is effectively a free-for-all for employers to be able to recruit from wherever they wanted to. When we had some of those discounts, when it was too easy for the exploitation to take place, then too often what you got was employers recruiting from overseas, when what we should have had was much more of a workforce strategy here in the UK," Cooper continued.
The Home Secretary later elaborated on a strategic framework, referred to as the "quad arrangement," which will be detailed in the forthcoming White Paper. This approach seeks to align workforce and immigration policies. The approach links four key elements: employers, represented by the Industrial Strategy Council, who are encouraged to focus on domestic recruitment and training; the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), tasked with reducing economic inactivity and increasing workforce participation; skills organisations, such as Skills England and equivalent bodies in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, which will target training needs; and the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), which will guide immigration policy to align with labour market demands.
Cooper noted that the immigration skills surcharge, intended to incentivise employer training, has failed to address key issues, particularly in sectors like IT, which remain heavily reliant on overseas recruitment. The White Paper will propose new approaches to better integrate these elements, reduce reliance on immigration, and address sector-specific workforce challenges.
The Home Secretary would not say when the White Paper might be published.
The Committee's session also covered the work of the new Border Security Command and the Government's increased cooperation with European neighbours to reduce small boat crossings. Cooper explained: "Having looked at how law enforcement takes place, I think that cross-border law enforcement across all of our countries is much weaker than it should be. There is a growing interest now across a lot of European countries in going after those criminal smuggler gangs. It is becoming a shared priority and that it why it was a central part of the G7 agreement that we reached. Some of it does involve things like changing laws."
While the Home Secretary reiterated the UK's commitment to safe and legal routes for people fleeing persecution, she said such routes are not an alternative to going after the criminal gangs. When asked whether safe routes to the UK could be expanded as part of the solution to prevent Channel crossings, Yvette Cooper responded: "I think we already have different forms of safe routes, that will always need to be part of the UK system. That is one of the things that we did with the family reunion for Afghanistan and that will always need to be part of the system. All countries will always need to do their bit but I think it is just not an alternative to the enforcement we need against the criminal gangs who are making such huge profits."
With regard to reducing the asylum backlog, the Home Secretary told the Committee that the backlog had surged due to a collapse in asylum decision-making processes before the election, with monthly interviews and decisions dropping by up to 80%. She explained that since then, the Government has prioritised reinstating these processes, significantly increasing the number of interviews and decisions being made.
"We have got decision-making right back up again now. The caseworkers are back in place, we have the decisions churning through and interviews are taking place. That means that the backlog is coming down. That work has put additional pressure on throughout the summer but we had to get that action going so that we can now keep bringing the backlog down," the Home Secretary said.
She later highlighted the problems caused by the "incomprehensible" Illegal Migration Act, noting: "When decisions had been taken on cases that had arrived in February 2023 and we were on to the March 2023 cohort, no decisions could legally be made. In theory, decisions on around half the cohort who were not covered by the framework of Illegal Migration Act were possible but there was no practical, operational way to distinguish between the people who were covered by the Illegal Migration Act, and for whom you could not take decisions, and the people who were not covered by the Illegal Migration Act, and for whom legally you could take decisions. Therefore the Home Office was left with a situation where legally they could not take decisions on thousands of cases. We did keep going on the cases they thought they could consider. That is why numbers dropped to 2,000, 3,000 a month, from the previous 11,000 a month. The Home Office is still taking a small number of decisions but, basically, the system gets stuck and clogged up. Had we carried on with that retrospective arrangement, we would have tens of thousands more people stuck in the backlog, with no decisions being made on their cases and effectively a big increase in the use of hotels over the rest of this year."
Cooper reiterated the Government's desire to stop using asylum hotels, calling their use "an appalling waste of taxpayers' money". She told the Committee: "The work that Angela Eagle is taking forward is all about how to get much better value for money and also work with local authorities on the most effective locations for asylum accommodation while overall trying to bring any need for asylum accommodation right down."
You can read the full transcript of the evidence session here.