Starmer promises net migration will fall ‘significantly’ by end of this parliament
Starmer is now taking questions.
Q: Are you promising net migration will fall every year?
Starmer says he wants to get net migration down significantly. But he does not commit to net migration falling every year.
I promise that [net migration] will fall significantly, and I do want to get it down by the end of this parliament, significantly.
Key events
Key points from Starmer’s press conference on immigration
Keir Starmer did not go into detail during his speech and Q&A in Downing Street this morning. The Home Office has not published the immigration white paper yet (although it has extensively trailed most or all of the key announcements), and this morning it felt as if Starmer’s main concern was to set the political framework, rather than to explain the policy detail. Here are the main points he made.
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Starmer promised to cut net migration significantly by the end of this parliament. (See 8.43am.) He used the word “promise’” several times, including in his opening statement when he said:
Now, make no mistake, this plan means migration will fall. That’s a promise.
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But he declined an invitation to promise that net migration would fall every year. (See 8.43am.) Asked if it would fall every year, he replied:
I’m promising it [net migration] will fall significantly, and I do want to get it down by the end of this parliament, significantly. That is what this plan is intended to achieve.
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He said that, if the white paper measures failed to bring down net migration significantly, “further measures” would be introduced. In his opening statement he said:
I want to be very clear on this, if we do need to take further steps, if we do need to do more to release pressure on housing and our public services, then mark my words we will.
He repeated this point during the Q&A – but without saying that those further measures might be.
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He rejected claims that curbing immigration would be bad for growth. Generally economists believe that immigration boosts growth, and this assumption has historically influenced the Treasury’s approach to policy making. But, when asked about this, Starmer argued that the experience of the last few years showed that immigration doesn’t always help growth. He said:
The theory that higher migration numbers necessarily lead to higher growth has been tested in the last four years. We’ve had the highest net migration when the last government lost control, to nearly on million, and stagnant growth. And so that link doesn’t hold on that evidence.
He also stressed that the white paper addressed skills and training. “One of the reasons that we’ve had stagnant growth, in my view, for years, is because we’ve under-invested chronically in skills and growth,” he said.
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He rejected suggestions that Labour MPs might be “squeamish” about the government taking a tough line on immigration. Asked about this, he said:
On squeamishness, I actually think that the Labour party has as core values the idea that immigration should be controlled, that it should be selective, we should be choosing who we want, higher skills, the high talent routes into our country. And it must be fair.
Nations depend on rules, fair rules. Sometimes they’re written down, often they’re not. But either way, they give shape to our values, guide us towards our rights, of course, but also our responsibilities, the obligations we owe to each other.
Now in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.
I don’t think it’s sensible to put a hard edged cap on it.
That has been done in one form or another for the best part of 10 years by different prime ministers.
The only thing that links those prime ministers and the various caps or quotas or limits they put in place is – every single one of them failed, and therefore going down the failed route is not a sensible way for me, as with everything that I do, serious, pragmatic, looking at the things that will actually make a material difference.
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He said that, with the white paper, Labour is implementing the ‘take back control’ approach to immigration promised, but not delivered, by Brexiter Tories. (See 8.36am.)
Q: Do you think the UK needs to further disentangle itself from the European convention on human rights?
Starmer says he does not think that is necessary. He says, if the UK does not comply with international law, it will not be able to sign international law enforcement agreements.
And that’s the end of the press conference.
Starmer rejects claim he has changed his views on deporting foreign criminals
Q: Five years ago you signed a letter objecting to the deportation of foreign criminals. Your views have changed, haven’t they?
Starmer rejects this. As DPP he was in favour of foreign criminals being deported, he says.
He does not address the point raised by the letter he signed in 2020 – an issue that Tories have raised frequently in the past.
Q: During the election you said you had a comprehensive plan to bring down illegal immigration. But that is not happening. So why should people believe your plan to control legal migration will work?
Starmer says he is convinced that he can deal with illegal immigration by tackling the gangs. The border security bill will give the authorities new powers to tackle these gangs. But the Tories are voting against, he says.
Starmer says controlling immigration is a core Labour value. People think the system should be fair.
Starmer says, if further policies needed to cut net migration, he will introduce them
Q: Why should people believe that you will succed where other governments failed? And why don’t you set a target for reducing immigration?
Starmer says this is a comprehensive plan.
He wants to reduce net migration, he says.
And he says, if he needs to go further to achieve that, he will.
He also says in the past targets have not worked.
Q: Have you changed your personal views on this? Did you used to believe immigration was good for growth?
Starmer says at Labour conference three years ago he argued that taking back control was a Labour argument. He says he made the same argument in his speech to the CBI in 2022 too.
Q: What is your reaction to the news that the US and China have agreed a trade deal?
Starmer says he only saw this as he was coming to the press conference, and is not across the detail.
If he wants to learn more after the press conference, he should read Graeme Wearden’s business live blog, which is covering it in detail.
Q: If you want to grow the economy, won’t these plans make it harder because it will be more difficult for people to get UK citizenship?
Starmer says he does not accept the argument that high immigration is always good for growth. The last government had high immigration but stagnant growth.
Starmer promises net migration will fall ‘significantly’ by end of this parliament
Starmer is now taking questions.
Q: Are you promising net migration will fall every year?
Starmer says he wants to get net migration down significantly. But he does not commit to net migration falling every year.
I promise that [net migration] will fall significantly, and I do want to get it down by the end of this parliament, significantly.
Starmer says he wants to tighten immigration rules because he believes in rules.
Nations depend on rules, fair rules. Sometimes they’re written down, often they’re not, but either way, they give shape to our values, guide us towards our rights, of course, but also our responsibilities, the obligations we owe to each other.
He says the current immigation system is “almost designed to permit abuse, that encourages some businesses to bring in lower paid workers rather than invest in our young people”.
And he says this is something he has been arguing for for some years.
Starmer rejects claim immigration white paper is just ploy to see off electoral threat from Reform UK
Starmer says it is a mistake to view what he is annoucing today in just party political terms.
He is referring to claims that this is just about seeing off the theat from Reform UK.
He says:
On a day like today, people who like politics will try to make this all about politics, about this or that strategy, targeting these voters, responding to that party.
No, I’m doing this because it is right, because it is fair and because it is what I believe in.
Starmer says his policies will deliver ‘take back control’ of migration promised, but not delivered, by Tory Brexiters
Keir Starmer is speaking now. He says this strategy is crucial to his Plan for Change.
He is framing this in Brexit terms.
He says the government is finally taking back control of our borders, and closing the book “on a squalid chapter for our politics”.
He goes on:
Take back control – everyone knows that slogan, and everyone knows what it meant on immigration, or at least that’s what people thought.
Because what followed from the previous government, starting with the people who used that slogan, was the complete opposite.
Between 2019 and 2023, even as they were going round our country telling people with a straight face that they would get immigration down, net migration quadrupled, until in 2023 it reached nearly 1 million. That’s about the population of Birmingham, our second largest city. That’s not control. It’s chaos.
And look, they must answer for themselves. But I don’t think that you can do something like that by accident. It was a choice, a choice made even as they told you, told the country, they were doing the opposite – a one-nation experiment in open borders conducted on a country that voted for control.
Well, no more. Today, this Labour government is shutting down the lab. The experiment is over. We will deliver what you’ve asked for time and again, and we will take back control of our borders.
The Conservatives have rejected suggestions that Keir Starmer is being tough on immigration. In a statement released overnight in response to the briefing about the white paper plans, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said:
Keir Starmer pretends to be tough, but just weeks ago his MPs voted against our 10-year residency and economic contribution test for indefinite leave to remain. Now he says that immigrants who make no contribution should still be allowed to stay.
He is trying to take steal credit for recent substantial reductions in visa numbers that resulted from Conservative reforms in April 2024.
Starmer also suspended the Conservative plan for a £38,000 salary threshold for family visas. Will he now bring that back?
Today Conservatives are forcing a vote on a binding migration cap and removing the Human Rights Act from immigration matters. But Starmer and Labour will vote it down.
Starmer is the same man who wrote letters protesting against deporting dangerous foreign criminals and has overseen the worst ever start to a year for illegal immigrants crossing the channel. The idea that Starmer is tough on immigration is a joke.
Philp is referring to a Tory amendment to the border security, asylum and immigration bill, which is going through its remaining stages in the Commons this evening.
Care sector expresses alarm about plan to end international recruitment of care workers
Care providers are worried about the proposals to end the international recruitment of care workers. In a statement issued yesterday, Jane Townson, CEO of the Homecare Association, which represents homecare providers, said:
International recruitment is a lifeline for the homecare sector, enabling us to provide vital support to older and disabled people in their own homes. Care providers are already struggling to recruit within the UK. We are deeply concerned the government has not properly considered what will happen to the millions of people who depend on care at home to live safely and independently.
And this morning Amy Clark, commercial director of a care home firm in Cornwall, told the Today programme that she did not think it was realistic for the government to expect care homes to recruit all their staff domestically. She said:
The big problem that we would have is if we weren’t able to recruit any overseas staff because recruiting locally is very, very difficult.
We try all the time to recruit locally. We put our wages up, we still don’t get applicants.
We’ve always paid higher than minimum wage, but that is becoming increasingly difficult, especially with the national insurance costs and also the national minimum wage increase and the pitiful uplift from the local authorities in relation to the social care funding.
It is worth stressing that today’s white paper is about legal immigration. Polling suggests that the public are worried about high levels of legal immigration, but the political debate about immigration is largely driven by concern about illegal, or irregular, immigration – people arriving in small boats, and being housed, particularly in hotels, if they are claiming asylum.
Irregular immigration accounts for only a small proportion overall immigration. According to Office for National Statistics figures, 1.2 million came to live in the year ending June 2024. During that period, 39,000 people arrived on small boats. Most of them tried to claim asylum, and this chart, from the ONS, shows the asylum numbers compared to people coming to the UK through other routes.
This is widely misunderstood. In its briefing on the local elections published last week, the campaign group More in Common released polling showing that many voters – and more than half of Tory and Reform UK supporters – believe more than 50% of immigration to the UK is illegal. (More in Common says the real number is closer to 10%.) Lib Dem and Green supporters are the best informed, but even around a third of them believe the ‘more than 50%’ fiction.
Here is an analysis of the what we are expecting in the white paper from Rajeev Syal, the Guardian’s home affairs editor.
And here is an extract.
[The white paper] will challenge a central tenet of Labour’s economic policies for decades: that immigration is broadly good because it helps the economy to grow.
Government insiders say that the “failed free-market experiment” of allowing overseas workers to freely enter the UK has been a major factor in generating political chaos over the past decade.
In his insistence that foreign workers should learn “our language”, Keir Starmer appears to have adopted elements of the populist language once closely associated with Nigel Farage.
It is the kind of language that generated criticism from Labour politicians when used by the Reform UK leader more than a decade ago.
Keir Starmer to announce new measures to ‘tighten up’ immigration system
Good morning. Keir Starmer is today unveiling the government immigration white paper, which he says will tighten the rules across all aspects of the visa system. He is holding a press conference at 8.30am. In comments released overnight, he said this would mark “a clean break from the past”.
It is normal to assume that Whitehall policy changes when government changes, but there is more continuity in policy making than party politicians tend to admit and the “clean break” probably happened 18 months ago. Before then, governments (Labour and Tory) were tolerant of high levels of net migration, both when the UK was in the EU and after it left (when net migration soared under the Tories). In December 2023 James Cleverly, the then home secretary, announced a drastic package of changes to visa rules that he said would cut net migration by 300,000 a year. Today Labour, with Yvette Cooper as home secretary, is going further, but in the same direction. In some respects it’s a Cooperly announcement. But that does not mean it’s not a big deal, particularly for the Labour party.
Some of the commentary around today’s announcement has presented this as a kneejerk response to Reform UK’s huge success in the local elections. Starmer is certainly worried about Reform; in an interview published yesterday, he told the Sun on Sunday that even before the local elections “we were planning on the basis we were likely to be facing Reform at the next election” rather than the Tories as Labour’s main opponents. But Labour is also worried about losing votes to the Liberal Democrats and the Green and, if this was just a Reform sabotage operation, Starmer would have announced this before the local elections, not after. The plans that Starmer is announcing today are the culmination of policy that has been evolving ever since he told the CBI in a speech in 2022 that he wanted “to help the British economy off its immigration dependency”. At that point, if you had told him there was a real chance of Nigel Farage becoming PM by the end of the decade, he would not have taken you seriously.
The white paper has been subject to almost as much pitch rolling and advance briefing as a budget. The Home Office has already released three press notices about it – saying that “Britain’s failed immigration system will be radically reformed”, that the plans will “make it easier to remove foreign criminals committing crimes in the UK”, and that “international recruitment for care workers will end”. And here is Rajeev Syal’s overnight preview.
According to the No 10 overnight briefing, this is what Keir Starmer is due to say this morning.
For years we have had a system that encourages businesses to bring in lower paid workers, rather than invest in our young people.
That is the Britain this broken system has created.
Every area of the immigration system, including work, family and study, will be tightened up so we have more control. Enforcement will be tougher than ever and migration numbers will fall.
We will create a system that is controlled, selective and fair.
One that recognises those who genuinely contribute to Britain’s growth and society, while restoring common sense and control to our borders.
This is a clean break from the past and will ensure settlement in this country is a privilege that must be earned, not a right.
And when people come to our country, they should also commit to integration and to learning our language.
Lower net migration, higher skills and backing British workers – that is what this white paper will deliver.
Here is the agenda for the day.
8.30am: Keir Starmer holds a press conference about the immigration white paper.
2.30pm: Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is expected to make a statement to MPs about the immigration white paper.
3.45pm: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
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