Discussing Immigration Controls For Foreign Students

Discussing the Home Affairs Select Committee report on immigration controls for foreign students on Radio 4's PM programme:

Discussing Immigration Controls For Foreign Students

Mark Reckless MP On Unjustified CRB Checks

Mark Reckless MP discusses the issue of councils carrying out unjustified CRB checks for job applicants

Mark Reckless MP On Unjustified CRB Checks

Mark Reckless Quizzes Police Minister

During last week's meeting of the Home Affairs Select Committee Mark Reckless MP took the opportunity to question the Minister for Policing and Justice, the Rt Hon Nick Herbert MP, on the role directly elected commissioners could play in making better use of taxpayers' money.

Q168 Mark Reckless: In Kent we have already identified £11.5 million of savings through collaboration with Essex, and there are one or two other examples—Herts and Beds comes to mind—where there has been good progress. But generally the savings from collaboration have been rather disappointing, and I wondered whether you thought Ministers might be able to accelerate this, or whether you would look to the directly elected police and crime commissioners to be able to drive out much more substantive savings through collaboration?

Nick Herbert: I think I agree with you that progress up until now has been too slow, but I think that is partly because there hasn’t been the kind of fiscal driver to do it. Now that police forces know that they are receiving less grant for the next four years, that is, I think, changing the incentives, both for chief constables and for police authorities. It is driving much more interest on the part of police forces in collaboration, outsourcing, better procurement, and so on. Because they all share the same desire as we do in the Government, which is to maintain the front-line policing service and the service that the public receives and find savings in other ways, in better use of taxpayers’ money.

Mark Reckless Quizzes Police Minister

Controlling Immigration

Today we publish our first Report of the Home Affairs Select Committee in this Parliament. All our eleven members were elected by, and in competition with, other MPs, rather than on the say-so of party whips, so our conclusions are completely independent of government.

However, on the ‘Immigration Cap’, the subject of our first report, I am delighted to be full-square behind the government and to have a fellow Kent MP, Damian Green, as the minister controlling immigration. After a decade during which net immigration has run at hundreds of thousands a year we are going to deliver on our manifesto promise and reduce it to just tens of thousands.

Our Report today focuses on just one area of immigration, people from outside the European Economic Area (“EEA”) who apply for work visas. One key conclusion of the Committee is that the Government must move far beyond this category, and will need to impose tighter controls on students and, potentially, family migration if it is to cut net immigration to just tens of thousands a year as promised.

We cannot control some immigration, e.g. the increase last year in the number of UK citizens abroad choosing to return to the UK, so we must control others routes as stringently as necessary to cut net immigration to tens of thousands a year. This need not though mean damaging the economy, since:

• Perhaps half of Tier 1 migrants, who were defined by the previous government as being so highly skilled that we should give them a visa even if they didn’t have a job, have only been able to get unskilled work, so these visas can be reallocated; and

• If a particular business really needs a particular overseas national to work in the UK, then that can be accommodated within an overall cap by auctioning available permits to businesses which benefit most from foreign workers.

Controlling Immigration