UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has faced a strong pushback from business groups, the care sector and universities after he announced a migration crackdown and warned that Britain risked becoming “an island of strangers”.
In sweeping reforms to the immigration system unveiled on Monday, migrants to the UK will need to spend a decade in the country before applying to settle unless they can show “a real and lasting contribution to the economy and society”.
The proposal to end automatic settlement after five years is part of major curbs on legal migration that will heavily restrict employers’ ability to hire overseas staff for lower-skilled roles. The visa route for social care workers — a major driver of migration to Britain in recent years — will also be abolished.
Under the suite of reforms, international students will only be allowed to stay in the country without a skilled worker visa for 18 months after finishing their course, down from two years currently, while universities face a 6 per cent levy on their fee income from international students.
Starmer’s reforms and tough rhetoric come after Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party scored major successes in English local elections this month, opening up a big lead in national opinion polls.
The prime minister said Britain had seen a “one-nation experiment in open borders” under the last Conservative government, adding: “That’s not control, that’s chaos.”
The proposed changes, described by the Conservatives as too timid, would end a “squalid chapter for our politics, our economy and our country” and would encourage the training and hiring of UK workers.
But some business groups responded angrily to the proposals. Jane Gratton, deputy director of policy at the British Chambers of Commerce, said the government’s plans to increase employer fees to hire from overseas “will place additional burdens on firms who need to fill urgent vacancies” and “comes at a time when businesses are already facing mounting cost pressures”.
Rain Newton-Smith, chief executive of CBI, the employers’ organisation, said “labour shortages can’t be solved by training alone”, noting that “immigration policy is preventing businesses from accessing critical skills to deliver investment, putting at risk growth and jobs in the rest of their workforce”.
Professor Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, which represents independent social care providers, said that “rather than investing in the sector and solving the recruitment crisis, the government is closing the door on one of the only workforce pipelines still functioning”.
“Social care is not low-skilled work. It is high-skilled, low-pay work that deserves respect, proper recognition and meaningful investment,” he said. There were 131,000 unfilled vacancies in the sector, he added.
Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK (UUK), said the changes would heap more pressure on higher education. “We would urge government to think carefully about the impact that a levy on international student fees will have on universities and the attractiveness of the UK as a study destination.”
Starmer did not set a target for cuts in migration and has rejected a Tory proposal of an annual cap, but said: “I’m promising it will fall significantly.”
According to government calculations, the measures will reduce the number of people arriving in the UK by 98,000 per year.
This would mean that net migration in 2029-2030 would fall to about 240,000, down from the Office for Budget Responsibility’s current forecast of 340,000 as a long-term average.
But one Home Office official stressed the estimates should not be used to work out Starmer’s overall net migration target, as other measures were being rolled out to reduce flows that “could reduce net migration further”.
Net migration reached a peak of 906,000 in the year to June 2023 under the previous Tory government, but started falling after it cracked down on visas for families and dependants and increased the salary threshold for many occupations.
The prime minister said on Monday he was not making the changes for political reasons but because “it is fair, and because it is what I believe in”.
The proposals were met with stinging rebukes from MPs who were already frustrated about Starmer’s tack to the right on several policy areas, including welfare and transgender rights.
Labour MP Sarah Owen said “chasing the tail of the right risks taking our country down a very dark path”.
Independent MP John McDonnell, formerly Labour’s shadow chancellor, accused Starmer of using “shockingly divisive” language that reflected the sentiment of Enoch Powell, a former Conservative minister.
In his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, Powell said the impact of immigration had made white Britons feel “strangers in their own country”. Allies of Starmer said this was “a coincidence” and that the prime minister’s line was “pretty different”.
Starmer’s white paper also set out plans to increase the salary threshold for all visa holders seeking to bring over dependants and raise English-language requirements for applicants and dependants.
The prime minister added that he would be prepared to take additional steps to reduce immigration, if needed. “Mark my words, we will,” he said.
He batted away suggestions that the crackdown would further undermine Britain’s sluggish growth, leaving employers with gaping labour shortages.
“The theory that higher migration numbers necessarily leads to higher growth has been tested in the last four years,” he said, arguing that migration had quadrupled but economic growth had stagnated.
John Springford, an economist at the Centre for European Reform, said Starmer’s suggestion that high levels of migration had contributed to stagnating output was “flat wrong”, noting that growth had been held back by high energy costs and Brexit.
“The majority of economists think migration has a positive impact on GDP per capita,” he said.
Additional reporting by David Sheppard
