Controlling Migration

Lord Field of Birkenhead Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend is right about the need to ensure that people in the UK are skilled enough to take up the work available. The figures show that EU-UK immigration and emigration numbers have broadly balanced out, and that net migration is coming predominantly from outside the EU. Our immigration policy has to fit in closely with the skills agenda that my right hon. Friend the Business Secretary announced last week. On occasions, however, there will be highly skilled workers with a specialism that a British company needs—in areas such as the energy sector, for example—and it is right for Britain to be open for business, and for us to allow companies to grow by introducing those workers into the UK.

[Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

Given the views that were so robustly expressed during the general election campaign, I welcome, on behalf of many of my constituents, the Home Secretary’s statement. Will she bear in mind another of their views, which is that they are now aware that the population of this country is primarily pushed by immigration? Will she tell us more certainly when she will return to the House to give a statement on breaking the link between coming here to work, which is often welcome, and almost automatically getting the right to citizenship?

[Mrs May]

I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s comments, and for his work, with my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames), on settlement in the UK. They have both done a lot of important work in highlighting the issue. I am afraid that I will disappoint the right hon. Gentleman in not being able to give him a date when I will come to the House, but I assure him that I will do so in due course, to show how we will be able to change that route. As he said, the British public were absolutely clear that the Government should do something about this matter. They saw a Labour Government who did not do anything about immigration. We are a Government who will deliver for the British people.