Immigration running at ‘unsustainable’ level, says senior Tory, ahead of publication of figures for 2022 – UK politics live

The Office for National Statistics immigration figures for 2022 are expected to show a record number of people arriving

In his Today programme interview Sir John Hayes, the Tory former minister who chairs the Common Sense group for rightwing government backbenchers, was asked what was wrong with high immigration, given that people were coming to the UK to do jobs that weren’t being done by British workers. He replied:

Well, it is certainly that the ease of paying workers from abroad displaces investment in domestic skills, including upskilling the existing workforce. But it also displaces investment in the modernisation of economy, and in better working practices. And the consequence is bound to inhibit productivity and damage competitiveness.

So you’re right that we should be training people, giving opportunities … and immigration doesn’t help with that. It displaces that kind of concentration.

We’ve got 2.5 million people on long-term sick leave. We’ve got very many disabled people who said they want to work and can’t get jobs. We’ve got a lot of people who left the workforce during Covid, older people typically, who we need to get back into the workforce. So the argument there are no Britons for these jobs does not really stand up to the test of those figures.

[The figures] will say that they’ve lost control of the issue. They have failed to have a strategy in place for our local labour market, and as a result of that, employers are being forced to reach for overseas immigration.

We need a much more balanced approach, ensuring that we have the immigration we need of course, but that there’s much more opportunity for skills, productivity training, workforce planning to get our economy firing on all cylinders again.