Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment has been made of international examples of regional migration schemes, including those operating in Canada and Australia, and their applicability to Scotland.

Regional migration schemes would create internal borders within the UK, which operates on a much smaller geographic scale to Canada or Australia and has fewer barriers to people relocating within it. The Migration Advisory Committee has looked at this issue many times and found the labour market needs of the different UK nations to be broadly similar.

Employment is a devolved matter and migration is only a small part of the labour market. However, our approach is to link migration policy and visa controls to skills and labour market policies, so that immigration is not used as an alternative to training or tackling workforce problems in the UK. As such, the Devolved Governments are represented in our new Labour Market Evidence Group to take account of workforce needs in different areas of the UK.