Rishi Sunak will come under new pressure from the Tory Right after the local elections with a demand for him to commit to bring net migration down to the “tens of thousands”.
Former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick – who is considered a potential candidate in a future leadership contest – has co-authored a 100-page report entitled Taking Back Control.
He said: “For nearly 30 years politicians have promised to control and reduce legal migration, only for numbers to spiral to historically unprecedented levels. This has been corrosive to the trust voters have in our democracy and politics. It must end.”
The latest statistics suggest that in the 12 months to June last year Britain’s net migration figure was 672,000.
The report will be published in the days after the council, mayoral and police and crime commissioner elections in which the Conservatives are widely expected to make significant losses.
Mr Jenrick quit the Government in December, claiming the Government’s legislation to stop its plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda being blocked by legal challenges did “not go far enough”.
The document, produced with the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, will call for the introduction of a Migration Budget with caps for overall numbers and specific routes set by votes in Parliament.
It will press for the UK to be the “grammar school of the Western world” and attract high-skill, high-wage migrants who will be “net contributors” to the public purse.
A further recommendation is that the Government should publish a Migration Book along the lines of the Red Book provided by the Chancellor at each Budget. It would look at the impact of migration on finances, housing, infrastructure and access to public services.
Mr Jenrick said: “Now we have left the EU, ended freedom of movement and taken back control of our legal migration policy this can finally be rectified. The Government should introduce a cap on migration, voted on by parliament, as a democratic lock on numbers. This is the only way to guarantee promises to reduce migration will be kept and would ensure all MPs are directly accountable to the public on such an important issue.”
Former health minister and co-author Neil O’Brien said: “When David Cameron set the goal of getting net migration down to the tens of thousands we didn’t actually have control over migration from the EU and in the years that followed many people came from Europe and the target was missed. But since Brexit we do have the powers and control we need to make this happen – we just haven’t used them yet.
“Without some kind of overall cap on numbers there is no discipline and no proper debate about the trade-offs between different types of migration. We need to bring back an overall cap to ensure migration is reduced to sustainable levels.”
