Immigration Bill

Simon Danczuk Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

We have introduced a limit on economic migration from outside the EU, cut out abuse of student visas and reformed family visas. As a result, net migration is down by a third. Our objective—

[Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Lab)]

Will the Home Secretary give way?

[Mrs May]

Well, if the hon. Gentleman really wants to intervene.

[Simon Danczuk]

The Home Secretary says that net migration is down by a third; the reality is that it has fallen by only a quarter. The House of Commons Library has confirmed that, and the Government are at risk of misleading Parliament. Would the Home Secretary like to correct the record?

[Mrs May]

It is a bit cheeky for a Labour Member to stand up and complain about the figures for falling migration. Immigration is down since 2010 and net migration is down by a third from its peak in 2010.

Our objective remains to reduce annual net migration to the tens of thousands by the end of the Parliament, and we must also reform the immigration system that manages the flow of migrants in and out of the UK. When I addressed the House in March this year, I explained that the immigration system that we had inherited from the last Government was chaotic and dysfunctional. Having created a separate entity in the UK Border Force to get a grip on border checks, we were left with a UK Border Agency that still lacked transparency and accountability, and to tackle that I split the UK Border Agency into two distinct operational commands inside the Home Office—UK visas and immigration and immigration enforcement. I made it clear that while organisational reform was necessary to transform the way in which we dealt with immigration, it would not on its own be enough to achieve that goal. We also needed to update the IT infrastructure and to change the complicated legal and policy framework that so often worked against us. The Bill changes some of that legal and policy framework so that it will be possible for the immigration system to operate fairly and effectively.