Yvette Cooper has said she expects net migration to the Uk to fall “swiftly” under a Labour government, but refused to say by how much.
The shadow home secretary told broadcasters on Sunday that it was clear net immigration must come down. She stopped short of setting a target, however, saying the Conservatives had failed when they had done so.
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer made a renewed pitch for Conservative voters with a manifesto commitment to slash levels of immigration and ban law-breaking employers from hiring foreign workers.
Plans outlined by the Labour leader in the Sun on Sunday could include laws to bar companies that break employment law – by failing to pay the minimum wage, for example – from hiring workers from overseas. New legislation would also link the immigration system to training, with businesses that apply for foreign worker visas having to train British people to do the jobs.
Cooper told the BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “We’re not setting a target and the reason for that is partly because, to be honest, every time the Conservatives have done this, frankly, then they have just ended up being totally all over the place, ripping it up and discredited the whole system.
“Also, because from one year to another, there are variations. So, for example, the pandemic means the net migration figures, of course, fell, but the homes for Ukraine visa rightly meant that the figures increased because of the war in Ukraine.”
When pressed by Trevor Phillips on Sky News as to whether she believed UK residents could fill the thousands of vacancies in the adult social care sector and replace foreign workers, Cooper said there would continue to be a health and social care visa.
“Immigration has always been important to this country, including for international talent and different areas, but it needs to be properly controlled,” she said.
James Cleverly, the home secretary, responded to Labour’s plans by taking aim at its leader. “Keir Starmer has a track record of supporting high immigration levels and helping foreign criminals stay in Britain because he believes all immigration law is racist,” he said.
“This is yet another day where Starmer will say what he thinks people want to hear during an election because he lacks conviction to say what he believes.”
The Scottish National party, which held a campaign rally with more than 200 activists and candidates in Glasgow on Sunday afternoon, was critical of Labour’s pledge to cut net migration.
The SNP leader, John Swinney, said Scottish businesses were struggling to fill vacancies, adding: “The biggest economic threat to Scotland is the current hostility towards migration that we have from the UK.”
To applause, Swinney said Starmer’s rhetoric was “playing to a particular audience” that did not exist in Scotland”.
The UK has experienced broadly similar levels of immigration as other high-income countries over the past few decades, according to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory. Net migration – a commonly used measure of the overall scale of migration – was “unusually high” in the 12 months up to the end of June 2023, the thinktank said in January.
On illegal immigration, Cooper said Labour’s “initial assessments” suggested it would take a year to stop spending money on hotels to accommodate asylum seekers.
While Labour has pledged to scrap the government’s Rwanda scheme, Cooper declined to rule out sending asylum seekers to another country to have their claims processed.
“Keir has always said we would look at what works and there are different kinds of … offshore processing arrangements and things that have already been used at different times in the past,” she told the BBC.
