Keir Starmer needs to change how Whitehall runs immigration policy

Keir Starmer’s rhetoric about net migration causing “incalculable damage” has dominated coverage of the government’s new immigration white paper. But the government’s notable shift in tone has apparently not been matched by a significant change of approach in how immigration policy is designed.

Despite the white paper showing a recognition that migration is part of a wider policy landscape, the document fails to set out how the government intends to manage and adjudicate the trade-offs inherent in migration policy. A better approach would be to adopt an annual migration plan to help set out a clear strategy, allowing ministers to weigh up the interests and evidence across government and identify and resolve the trade-offs between migration policy and wider government priorities.  

An annual migration plan would provide predictability and credibility to the government’s approach. Without one, it seems inevitable that immigration policy will continue to be the result of knee-jerk responses to headlines, statistics releases and sectoral lobbying.

The government has rightly opted against unrealistic targets  

The government has rejected a hard cap on annual net migration, with the prime minister highlighting that previous governments’ attempts to impose such restrictions – such as David Cameron’s aim to bring net migration down to the “tens of thousands” – had all failed to produce results. This is sensible. Setting a headline numerical target can drive perverse incentives, as different forms of immigration will not have uniform effects on the economy, public services and housing.  

But the government could have done more to get away from a high-level number and instead seriously weigh up the broad costs and benefits of different migration routes, in line with its objectives for the immigration system. On the same day that the white paper was published, the Home Office also published some useful, in-depth research into visa routes, including setting out how people on each route use public services and the jobs they work in  ⁴ https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/migration-research-and-analysis  – but the government did not use this analysis to prompt a more nuanced debate in the white paper.  

The government has taken a more joined-up approach to immigration and the labour market

While the government is proposing to pull many of the policy levers used by its predecessors – changing skills thresholds, the duration of visas, and time to qualify for settlement – it has broken from the past in thinking more seriously about the role of migration in the labour market. The white paper sets out plans to bring together a range of evidence on skills and recruitment to inform immigration policy, and proposes that sectors key to the UK’s industrial strategy should only be able to recruit from abroad for jobs below degree level if they produce a workforce strategy focused on skills, training and broader conditions.

This is also welcome, but it is unclear exactly which organisations will be tasked with developing these strategies. The white paper says that the Home Office will work with a range of departments, including the Treasury and Department for Business and Trade, to “engage sector bodies”. But there is currently no formal mechanism to hold departments accountable, meaning sectors have little incentive to deliver on their skills and training plans or to reduce their dependence on overseas recruitment. When it comes to migration, the buck – and the headline figure – still ultimately stops with the Home Office.

The Home Office’s new permanent secretary, Antonia Romeo, has recognised this as a challenge – and has told the Commons Public Accounts Committee that the white paper requires new cross-government processes to make clear “who’s responsible for what, and who’s accountable, and how it’s coming together”.  

An annual migration plan would allow the government to be more realistic in its policies

The government’s approach is a good start at thinking about immigration in relation to the wider labour market, but some of the white paper’s policies sit uneasily with the government’s plans for the economy and public services, and it sidestep some of the trade-offs with the government's broader agenda. There is no explanation about how the government will support adult social care after scrapping the care worker visa, and the white paper’s tentative proposal of a levy on international students’ fees “to be reinvested into the higher education and skills system” provides little sense of what that would mean for a university sector under financial strain. These are decisions that need to be made, and properly owned, by the whole of government.

An annual migration plan would give the government a chance to review the progress made by different departments and sectors towards their labour market and skills commitments, in line with its overall objectives for migration policy. Without a proper way to negotiate the tensions between immigration and the wider policy agenda this government will, like its predecessors, be attempting a balancing act that is impossible to pull off.