Labour’s divisions on migration are laid bare as Rachel Reeves says Brits should be trained to fill vacancies in comments which put her at odds with other frontbenchers
- Rachel Reeves said she would not ‘turn to immigration as the easy answer’
Labour divisions on migration were laid bare yesterday after the shadow chancellor said jobless Britons should be trained to fill vacancies.
In comments which put her at odds with other Labour frontbenchers, Rachel Reeves said she would not ‘turn to immigration as the easy answer to these labour shortages’.
Ms Reeves, speaking on a visit to the United States, said allowing foreign workers to take British jobs ‘doesn’t make any sense at all’.
‘If we’ve got a shortage of data scientists, if we’ve got a shortage of nurses or doctors, and the Migration Advisory Council are saying we need to bring people in, then we should then be training those people,’ she told The Sun.
‘I think we could do much more to train up people who are already here in Britain.’
Labour divisions on migration were laid bare yesterday after the shadow chancellor said jobless Britons should be trained to fill vacancies
Last week Labour chairman Anneliese Dodds indicated that migration could increase in the ‘short term’ if the party comes to power
Yet last week Labour chairman Anneliese Dodds indicated that migration could increase in the ‘short term’ if the party comes to power.
‘If we had an immigration system that was working properly, potentially in some areas where there is a short-term need for skills, you could see in the short-term people who are coming in increasing in number,’ she told Sky News.
Ms Dodds said numbers would eventually fall as home-grown workers became better trained – but refused to set a target.
Westminster is braced for fresh data that is expected to show net migration reached record levels last year.
The Office of National Statistics is set to publish figures this week that could show net migration – the number of people arriving via legal means, subtracted from the amount leaving the country – reached at least 700,000 in the 12 months up to December 2022.
That will exceed the record of 500,000 set in the year to June 2022 and is substantially higher than the 226,000 level which stood when the 2019 Tory manifesto promised that ‘overall numbers will come down’ following the introduction of post-Brexit border controls.
Earlier this week, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said he ‘would expect it to come down and I want it to come down’ from 500,000.
The Labour leader declined to put a number on it when repeatedly pressed, saying previous governments tended to miss targets, but that the ‘direction of travel’ for net migration would be downwards.
