Rishi Sunak is facing demands from “red wall” Conservative MPs to slash the number of overseas care workers, foreign students and refugees allowed into the UK in time for the next election.
The MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, who call themselves the New Conservatives, have issued a 12-point plan to cut net migration to Britain from 606,000 to 226,000 before the end of 2024.
They include the Tory party deputy chair Lee Anderson, the backbencher Miriam Cates and the Ipswich MP, Tom Hunt, all usually considered to be loyal to the prime minister.
The pressure follows party anger over official figures released in May that showed that total long-term immigration was at a record high of 1.2 million people while emigration was 557,000. The rise had been largely fuelled by people from outside the EU entering the UK to study, work or escape conflict or oppression.
One red wall source said that Tory MPs in the north of England had been “hammered on the doorsteps” over immigration. “We promised a lot in 2019 about taking back control of our borders and time is ticking,” the source said.
Measures put forward by the New Conservatives include closing temporary schemes that grant eligibility for worker visas to “care workers” and “senior care workers” in order to reduce long-term inward migration (LTIM) by 82,000.
They also propose stopping graduating overseas students from staying on in the UK for up to two years to find work and extending the closure of the student dependent route that allows a student’s family members to access the jobs market. These two measures could cut LTIM by 125,000, the report claims.
The MPs advocate only allowing in skilled workers who earn £38,000 a year or more. This could reduce long-term inward migration by 54,000 people a year, they claim.
The measures have been criticised by experts for being over-simplistic and for being potentially damaging to the economy.
In the report, MPs tell Sunak that a promise to reduce immigration formed a key plank of Boris Johnson’s 2019 victory, when the Tories made sweeping gains in former Labour heartlands, the so-called red wall seats.
“Without swift action to get migration under control, the Conservative party will further erode the trust of hundreds of thousands of voters who lent the party their vote in 2019,” the report said.
The group also says the post-Brexit system has been “too lenient” and is not working, saying that “mass migration is having destabilising economic and cultural consequences”.
Other proposed measures include:
A cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees accepted for resettlement in the UK.
Caps on future humanitarian schemes such as the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong schemes should the predicted 168,000 reductions not be realised.
Implementation of the provisions of the illegal migration bill, which it is claimed would lead to a reduction of at least 35,000 from LTIM.
A raise in the minimum combined income threshold to £26,200 for sponsoring a spouse and raising the minimum language requirement to B1 (intermediate level). This should lead to an estimated 20,000 reduction in LTIM, the MPs claim.
Making the migration advisory committee report on the effect of migration on housing and public services, not just the jobs market, by putting future demand on a par with labour requirements in all studies.
A 5% cap on the amount of social housing that councils can give to non-UK nationals.
Raising the immigration health surcharge to £2,700 per person a year.
Madeleine Sumption, the director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, said the report made clear policy proposals but did not engage with the many potential tradeoffs for the UK.
“Both major political parties have said that they want migration to come down. Net migration is expected to decline anyway over the coming years even without policy changes. However, if they want more significant restrictions it requires an honest conversation about the wider consequences and how to mitigate them,” she said.
The report does not address how the MPs would make up for the loss of care workers or income from overseas students outlined in their document.
Sumption said: “One of the reasons demand for care workers has been so high is limited public funding in the care system. International students have been a growing source of revenue for universities, so proposals that would reduce student numbers cannot be considered in isolation from the funding of higher education.
“Would more public funding be available to mitigate the costs of lower migration in these areas?”
She said some of the proposals were “outlandish”. “For example, an NHS charge of £2,700 per person per year seems to be based on a misunderstanding of how the NHS is funded – namely, through income taxes.
“A charge this high would probably be the ‘tail that wags the dog’ of the rest of the policies the report proposes,” Sumption said.
• This article was amended on 3 July 2023. An incorrect press release led an earlier version to say the group wanted to cut net migration to 240,000. The correct figure is 226,000.
