Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman has said Keir Starmer could slash legal migration numbers relatively easily if he wanted to.
Mrs Braverman said the political will to cut numbers was not forthcoming from Rishi Sunak.
Speaking on GB News, Suella Braverman said: “[Immigration] is why I’ve been apologising for several months, actually, because we failed on immigration. It’s been an unequivocal failure by the last Conservative government. It’s one of the big reasons why we’re booted out of office in such an emphatic way by the British people.
“We made promise after promise to lower migration, and instead, we reached and oversaw unprecedented levels of net migration.
“And so yes, the Conservative Party does need to bow its head to the British people and say we got it wrong in the past, and we need to try and rebuild that lost trust.
“Well, I think that the reality is, is this has been a problem that the Conservative Party has failed to grapple with for many, many years, and not just for the Brexit vote.
“I voted for Brexit because I wanted to lower migration. I was proud to stand on the 2019 Conservative manifesto because it included a pledge to lower overall numbers. And despite those pledges, even going back to the time of David Cameron to lower the numbers to the tens of thousands, we failed.
“There’s one small kind of silver lining, if that’s the right term, but the numbers are falling. It’s not a consolation, because they are still out of control and far too high. But the 20% fall that we’re seeing in the figures published today do represent, hopefully, the beginning of a downward trend and they are thanks to the changes that I bought in place in May 2023.
“I went into the Home Office in the autumn of 2022 and I went in focused and determined and horrified by the scale of the problem at that stage. We had just had the figures from the ONS in the July of 2022 at which point the numbers had topped 1 million for the first time.
“We had issued 1.1 million work and study visas. And I thought that was horrific.
“I went in in the autumn of 2022 determined to turn the tide, and I set out a whole package of measures like raising the salary threshold, restricting the number of dependents, restricting the graduate route, which is a massive incentive for foreign students, and a whole lot of things.
“I managed to get a small portion of those measures through with the support the Prime Minister in May 2023, and namely, major restrictions to the number of dependents that students could bring. And we’ve seen a large fall in that number today.
“The OBR at the time, it’s slightly attenuating its view now but two years too late, frankly, for my for my liking. The OBR took a view and was quite wedded to this view that more immigrants coming into the country, regardless of what they were earning or regardless of what they were doing, would necessarily be a good thing for economic growth.
“I fundamentally disagreed then with that view, and I still do. And that view from the OBR infused and influenced most of the government departments, and that’s why the Home Office and as Home Secretary I was really the only Minister battling against the consensus for lower immigration.
“When it comes to legal migration, I don’t personally think we can blame the civil servants. I worked with the team there on legal migration. They were actually incredibly eager to exercise our new found powers that we had designed post Brexit, because, of course, we could no longer pass the buck to Brussels.
“We had developed a Points Based System, and it was actually relatively straightforward to implement these changes. There was no need to pass legislation and worry about the House of Lords. There would have been no need to worry about the human rights court in Strasbourg. There was no worry to about other logistical challenges.
“Politically speaking, this was very much within the executive decision-making sphere to make the changes to legal migration, like raising the salary threshold or making the changes to dependency. All I needed was the green light from the Prime Minister, and unfortunately, it wasn’t forthcoming.
“It’s relatively straightforward to fix this problem quickly, if the Prime Minister today wanted to.
“Keir Starmer’s stance is outrageous. He could if he wanted to implement a cap, which made a commitment in law to a limit to the number of people we bring into the country. He could if he wanted to scrap the graduate visa route. He could if he wanted to raise a salary threshold again. He could if he wanted to restrict the number of universities who could bring in foreign students, because it makes up for a massive amount of the immigration numbers.
“All of those things would be relatively simple to actually implement and would lead to quite quick results in the net migration figures.
“So this is on Keir Starmer now. If these figures stop falling, or they continue or they start to rise, this will definitely be a choice by this Prime Minister, not an accident.”
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