New visas for foreign builders are a welcome sign of Brexit pragmatism

Editorial: New rules for construction workers are part of Rishi Sunak’s step-by-step approach to fixing the problems caused by leaving the EU

10 March 2023 (Dave Brown)

One way in which Britain’s departure from the European Union may eventually be reversed could be by the slow and painful reinvention of all the features of membership, as the successive governments bow to the realisation that they are in our national interest.

The latest example may be the decision by Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt to increase the number of visas available for construction workers, in an attempt to ease the chronic labour shortage in the building industry since we left the EU. This aspect of the government’s immigration policy seems rather different from the inflammatory language deployed by Suella Braverman, the home secretary, in her campaign to stop the boats.

This is the face of the government’s policy that we prefer: agile, flexible and pragmatic, rather than a deliberate attempt to exploit xenophobia to cover up administrative failure. In many ways, the prospectus of liberal Brexiteers has been followed. We did not believe Boris Johnson and Michael Gove when they argued that leaving the EU would allow Britain to set its immigration criteria without discriminating in favour of EU citizens, but that is roughly what has happened. EU immigration has been replaced by large numbers of people from Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan on special resettlement programmes, and by other immigrants from outside the EU who meet the new points-based criteria.

Yet the dislocation of the break with the EU continues to cause severe problems in some sectors. Construction, including house building, is one, but seasonal farm labour such as fruit picking is another. So it is sensible for the government to adjust some of the “shortage occupation lists”, and to follow the advice of the Migration Advisory Committee to add bricklayers, plasterers, roofers and other construction workers.

We suspect that it is no coincidence that news of this change has leaked a week before the Budget, which Mr Hunt will present on Wednesday. It is well known that the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecasts for the economy are sensitive to assumptions about the future course of immigration trends. Liz Truss in her short premiership just about had time to have a tremendous dust-up with Suella Braverman, whom she had appointed as home secretary, on this question.

Ms Truss, although she was disinclined to take the OBR’s word as gospel, wanted to go for growth, and recognised that a restrictive immigration policy would act as a brake on that. Ms Braverman, on the other hand, wanted to promise that net immigration would fall. Ms Truss won that battle, although she quickly lost the war, and Ms Braverman, who returned to her post at the Home Office after five days in the cooler, is now prepared to live with a policy that prioritises prosperity.

As Professor Jonathan Portes argues in a new paper for The UK in a Changing Europe, public opinion could be ready to support a pragmatic and flexible immigration policy for the first time in years. “There is a broad consensus that any system should meet the needs of the economy and labour market, reward contribution, and be relatively generous towards genuine refugees,” he writes.

If the new rules for construction workers are part of Mr Sunak’s step-by-step approach to fixing the problems caused by leaving the EU, such as his Windsor Framework for rewriting the Northern Ireland protocol, we should welcome the beginning of a gradual reversal of Brexit.