Reducing net migration to tens of thousands per year 'remains a Government target'

Pledge to continue with policy comes after Home Secretary Amber Rudd would only say she aims to bring immigration down to ‘sustainable levels’

Tuesday 19 July 2016 21:07 BST

(PA)

The Government has maintained it still intends to reduce net migration to tens of thousands per year after Amber Rudd failed to put a figure on the target.

The Home Secretary said on Tuesday she will aim to bring immigration down to “sustainable levels”, declining to confirm whether this met with the Tory manifesto pledge of bringing net migration down to tens of thousands by 2020.

The target was missed during the last Parliament, as net levels exceeded 330,000 last year - up 20,000 on 2014.

Theresa May presides over her first Cabinet meeting (AFP/Getty)

The issue became a key factor in the Brexit campaign, with Boris Johnson claiming the figures showed Britain would be “kissing goodbye” to any hope of reducing migrant numbers unless it broke free of Brussels.

Speaking to the BBC, the Home Secretary said: "What the Prime Minister has said is that we must bring migration down to sustainable levels so that's what is going to be my aim at the moment."

Asked if the net migration target had changed, Ms Rudd said: "I'm going to stick to my comment which is about bringing it down to sustainable levels. That has to be the most important thing for the country."

Following the comments, Prime Minister Theresa May’s official spokeswoman said the goal remained in place.

She said: "The Prime Minister does see sustainable levels as down to the tens of thousands.

10 things immigration has done for Britain

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1/1010 things immigration has done for Britain

10 things immigration has done for Britain

The Mini

The 1959 classic, that is, perhaps our greatest piece of industrial design, a miracle of packaging and revolution in motoring. Its genius designer was Sir Alec Issigonis, who was an asylum seeker. His family, Greek, fled Smyrna when Turks invaded this borderland in around 1920, and he wound up studying engineering at Battersea Polytechnic. He went on to create that most English of motor cars, the Morris Minor, as well as the Austin-Morris 1100, all much loved products of his fertile imagination.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Marks and Spencer

Once upon a time there was no M&S in Britain, difficult as that may be to believe. We have one Michael Marks to thank for our most famous retailer, and he was a refugee from Belarus, arriving in England in about 1882, and soon after set off to flog stuff around Yorkshire. He eventually teamed with Thomas Spencer to create the vast business we know today.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Thunderbirds

And many other TV shows created, funded and otherwise produced by that largest of larger-than-life characters, Lew Grade (also a world class tap dancer). The man who dominated commercial television gave us memorable entertainment such as The Prisoner, the Saint and brought the Muppets to Britain (a sort of fuzzy felt wave of immigration), as well as puppet shows where you could see the strings. All this from a penniless Jew from Ukraine, born Lev Winogradsky, who escaped the pogroms in Ukraine with his family in the 1890s. His nephew Michael Grade has also done his bit for British television.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

The House of Windsor

Or the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until George V prudently rebranded the family during the First World War. Well, our royals are a pretty German bunch, as well as having various types of French and other alien blue blood coursing around their veins. ‘Twas ever thus. There was William the Conqueror, Norman French, who certainly broke the immigration rules; William of Orange, a direct import from Holland; the Hanoverian King Georges, the first barely able to speak English; Queen Victoria, who married a German, Edward VII, who couldn’t stay faithful to his wife, a Danish princess; George V wed another German princess; Edward VIII married an American (though she hardly visited England and prompted his emigration and exile); and the Queen is married to man born in Corfu. The embodiment of the British nation, to many, but one thinks of them as quite multicultural really.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

I Vow To Thee My Country

Our most patriotic hymn was the product of a man named Gustav Holst (pictured), born in Cheltenham, but of varied Swedish, Latvian and German ancestry, who adapted part of his suite The Planets to put a particularly stirring and beautiful poem to music, just after the Great War. As the second verse has it, “there's another country/I've heard of long ago/Most dear to them that love her/most great to them that know”. Imagine if the Holst family had been kept out because the quota on musical European types had been reached.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Curry and Cobra

Chicken Tikka Masala is, so they say, a dish which not only the most popular in Britain but specifically designed to cater for European tastes. For that we probably have to thank an Indian migrant, Sake Dean Mahomed, who came from Bengal to open the first recognisable Indian restaurant, the magnificently named “Hindoostanee Coffee House”. History does not record if a plate of poppadoms and accompanying selection of pickles and yoghurts were routinely placed on the table for new diners, but we do know that we had to wait until 1989 to taste the ideal lager for a curry - Cobra. That brew was brought to us by Karan (now Lord) Bilimoria, a Cambridge law graduate who hailed from Hyderabad.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

That big red swirly sculpture at the Olympic Park

Or Orbit, to give it its proper name, the work of Anish Kapoor, who arrived in 1973 from India and had the artistic imagination to fill a power station.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

The Sun

Love it or hate it, and many do both, this has been a symbol of much that is successful and a lot that is awful in British journalism since its inception in 1969. In its turn it spawned the Page 3 Girl and some nastily xenophobic headlines. All the stranger when you consider its creator was, of course, Rupert Murdoch, born 11 March 1931 in Melbourne, Australia.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

Marxism

OK, Karl Marx’s philosophy was not much of a gift to the world, but for a while it seemed like a good idea. Though we might not dare admit it, Marxism still has a few insights to offer to anyone wanting to understand the workings of capitalism, though too few to excuse everything that was done in its name. Born in Germany spent much time in the British museum and the British pub, buried Highgate Cemetery. Oddly, his ideas never really caught on in his adopted homeland.

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10 things immigration has done for Britain

The NHS

They came from many, many backgrounds, including Ireland, the Philippines, east Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, as they still do, but the contribution of the black nurses who came to the UK from the Caribbean to heal and care for is a debt of honour that must be recognised. It so sometimes forgotten that it was Enoch Powell, then Minister of Health (1960-62), who campaigned to recruit their skilled nurses to come and work over here. One abiding legacy we can thank Enoch for.

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"Sustainable levels is an approach and a language that has been used repeatedly by the Home Office in the past. The Prime Minister has used it herself. There isn't a change.

"The emphasis on 'sustainable' reflects the fact that this is about looking at what is the right level for our country, what communities across the country can cope with, pressure on public services, looking at all these issues."

Foreign Secretary Mr Johnson, a leading Leave campaigner, lambasted the Government’s failure to bring net migration down to below 100,000 during the lead up to the EU referendum, saying: “The system has spun out of control. We cannot control the numbers. We cannot control the terms on which people come and how we remove those who abuse our hospitality.”

However, he defended Ms Rudd on Tuesday saying: "I think the Home Secretary is entirely right to be careful about committing to numbers because one doesn't want to be in a position where you are disappointing people again.”

"What is certainly possible, post leaving the EU - and once we end our obligations under uncontrolled free movement - it will be possible to have a system of control.”

Who is Amber Rudd

On Sunday, the new Brexit minister David Davis suggested new EU migrants who head from Britain could be sent home to avoid a spike in immigration ahead of a withdrawal from the bloc.

He told the Mail on Sunday, Britain “may have to deal with" a potential increase in those travelling to Britain, adding: “We may have to say that the right to indefinite leave to remain protection only applies before a certain date."

On Tuesday, a government lawyer told the High Court in London that Britain will not invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty this year.

It follows Prime Minister Theresa May's announcement last week that Britain will not start the process of leaving the European Union until Scotland’s position in negotiations is clear.

Additional reporting by Press Association

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