Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of excluding Scotland from the scope of the net migration target.

Our immigration system is designed to work for the whole of the UK and surveys show that people in Scotland want to see net migration reduced. We have a Scotland-specific Shortage Occupation List to accommodate skills shortages which are specific to Scotland. Applying substantially different immigration rules to different parts of the UK would complicate the immigration system, harming its integrity, and cause confusion for applicants and difficulties for employers who need the flexibility to deploy their staff to other parts of the UK.