Immigration Update

Damian Green Excerpts

Wednesday 1st May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tom Pursglove]

It is a perfectly respectable position to want to protect our borders. It is right and proper to want to ensure that we have a fair and balanced system of legal migration that is sustainable. I make no apology whatsoever—and nor will this Government or any of the Ministers in the Home Office—for placing front and centre the determination to protect people’s lives. We have seen too many lives lost in the channel at the hands of evil criminal gangs with no regard whatsoever for human life who take people’s money, exploit them and send them out to sea in unseaworthy vessels. Candidly, beyond that, I am not going to edify the hon. Lady’s contribution with anything further.

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

I very much welcome the fact that the Minister is able to come to this House with the first encouraging signs of lower migration numbers, which will be welcomed widely outside this House—including, I suspect, in Scotland. Does he agree that the lesson we should draw from this is that taking practical, detailed measures to crack down on the exploitation of certain types of visa routes is the way to make progress on bringing immigration numbers down, rather than the windy rhetoric we heard from the Opposition spokesman?

[Tom Pursglove]

My right hon. Friend is a distinguished former Home Office Minister who had responsibilities in the immigration space, and I would argue that a lot of the measures that we have announced, and that are now all in flight, build on the earlier efforts of colleagues such as him. He is absolutely right that the policies are balanced and measured and that they deliver on the legitimate aim of wanting to reduce inflows of legal migration into our country, to ensure fairness, to ensure that the model is sustainable and to ensure that people who come here are able to be properly supported. I think that that is something that the British people strongly support, and I entirely share his sentiments.