‘Red wall’ Tories call for annual cap of 20,000 refugees admitted to UK – politics live

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Labour has described the Cabinet Office statement saying Sue Gray committed a “prima facie” breach of the civil service code when she took a job with the party (see 10.59am) as “a political stunt”. As Rowena Mason reports, a Labour spokesperson said:

All rules were complied with. The Acoba process makes that clear. This statement is a political stunt by a Tory government out of ideas and out of road.

It says everything you need to know about the Tories that they have spent weeks wasting time on this Mickey Mouse nonsense, while refusing to investigate the serious allegations against their London mayoral hopeful, Daniel Korski.

We’re looking forward to Sue Gray joining us this September as we continue to show the country that only Labour can build a better Britain.

The Cabinet Office has published a statement today saying there was a “prima facie” breach of the civil service code when Sue Gray started talking to Keir Starmer about the possibility of a job as his chief of staff.

At the end of last week Gray was cleared by the advisory committee on business appointments (Acoba) to start work with Labour in September, six months after she left her post as a second permanent secretary in the civil service.

In a written ministerial statement published this morning, Jeremy Quin, the Cabinet Office minister, implies that Gray broke civil service rules because she did not tell her bosses about the job offer from Labour. Quin said:

Ms Gray first spoke to the leader of the opposition in late October. This was approximately four months before she resigned from the Civil Service. The letter from Acoba also states that “… she had subsequent brief informal conversations … where she was updated on their developing plans …”. She did not inform ministers or the civil service of these interactions at any point prior to her resignation.

It is right that we maintain the principle of confidentiality with respect to individual personnel matters. However, I am sure the house will agree with me that the facts in this case, when compared to the rules and guidance in place for civil servants, speak for themselves, and that there is a public interest in ensuring that the civil service code is adhered to.

Given the exceptional nature of this case and the previous commitment by ministers to update the house, I can now confirm that the Cabinet Office process looking into the circumstances leading up to Ms Gray’s resignation has been concluded. As part of the process, Ms Gray was given the opportunity to make representations but chose not to do so. This process, led by the civil service, found that the civil service code was prima facie broken as a result of the undeclared contact between Ms Gray and the leader of the opposition.

Quin said it was “deeply unfortunate” that this happened, but that he retained confidence in the impartiality of the civil service.

“Prima facie” means at first sight and Quin’s use of the term in his statement is ambiguous, perhaps intentionally. In vernacular English it is often used to mean “clear cut”, and so it sounds as if this is particularly serious. But lawyers take it to mean “superficial”, as opposed to “on the basis of the actual evidence”, and Quin may have been acknowledging that, with Gray having not given the Cabinet Office her side of the story, the matter was never fully resolved.

In most workplaces an informal job offer from a rival organisation is not something people are routinely expected to disclose.

The Conservative MP Miriam Cates is a member of the New Conservatives group and she was on the Today programme this morning defending its plans for immigration, and in particular the proposal to stop foreign care workers getting work visas. When it was put to her that the care industry could not function without foreign workers, Cates said there were 5 million “economically inactive” people in the country and that, instead of hiring cheap labour from abroad, employers should be paying more so that Britons took the jobs instead.

When it was put to her that Britons aren’t applying for these jobs, Cates replied:

Well they’re not going to work in care until we make the pay and conditions good enough, and the only way we’re going to do that is to cut off the supply of cheap labour from abroad …

Let me use the analogy of during the pandemic when we had an HGV driver shortage and lots of people called then to say we must issue more visas to abroad to get more drivers.

But we didn’t, we made supply side reform and guess what? Haulage firms put up their wages, they attracted more workers and solved the problem without issuing visas to abroad. That’s exactly the same economic and market principle that we need to apply.

When asked how much firms should be paying their care workers, Cates said she did not have an answer to that. Kevin Schofield, at Huffington Post, has a full write-up of the interview.

The government has repeatedly said it wants to reduce the dependence of employers on foreign workers, but even after Brexit there has been relatively little progress on this front. Keir Starmer has also said that he wants to “help the British economy off its immigration dependency”, although, unlike the New Conservatives, Labour is not calling for big cuts in net migration numbers in the short term.

The New Conservatives, the group of “red wall” Tories calling for tighter controls on immigration, have published policy document giving details of their plan. Unusually, it’s a 12-point one, not a 10-point one.

It does not seem to be available online yet, so here it is.

1) Close the temporary schemes that grant eligibility for worker visas to ‘care workers’ and ‘senior care workers’. This policy will reduce visas granted by 117,000 between those workers and their dependents, leading to a reduction in ‘long-term inward migration’ of 82,000.

2) Raise the main skilled work visa salary threshold to ?38,000 per annum. This could reduce LTIM [long-term immigration] by 54,000 migrants per year.

3) Extend the closure of the student dependent route, which allows full access to the job market and is not subject to skill or salary thresholds, to students enrolled on one-year research master’s degrees. Combined with the government’s existing proposal, this could lead to a reduction in LTIM of around 75,000.

4) Close the graduate route to students, so as to stop students staying in the UK after graduating for up to two years without a job offer. This should lead to a reduction of around 50,000 in LTIM per year.

5) Reserve university study visas for the brightest international students by excluding the poorest-performing universities from eligibility criteria. This could lead to a reduction of 49,000 from LTIM.

6) Continue to monitor the reduction in visa applications under the humanitarian schemes and introduce caps on future humanitarian schemes should the predicted 168,000 reductions not be realised.

7) Rapidly pass and implement the provisions of the illegal migration bill, leading to a reduction of at least 35,000 from LTIM.

8) Cap the number of refugees legally accepted for resettlement in the UK at 20,000.

9) Raise the minimum combined income threshold to ?26,200 for sponsoring a spouse and raise the minimum language requirement to B1 (intermediate level). This should lead to an estimated 20,000 reduction in LTIM.

10) Make the migration advisory committee report on the effect of migration on housing and public services, not just the jobs market, by treating future demand on a par with labour requirements in all studies.

11) Cap the amount of social housing that councils can give to non-UK nationals at five percent until the number of British families waiting for housing clears.

12) Raise the immigration health surcharge to ?2,700 per person, per year.

Some of these ideas are similar to ideas that Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has been arguing for within government. And some would just build on initiatives the government is already taking. For example, the illegal migration bill says there should be a cap on the number of refugees admitted to the UK every year. The New Conservatives say the cap should be set at 20,000.

According to the Home Office, the UK offered protection to 23,841 people coming to the country in 2022.

Good morning. According to the main political write-through in the Sunday Times yesterday, Rishi Sunak feels life isn’t treating him fairly. Tim Shipman and Tom Calver wrote:

At Winchester, Oxford, Stanford, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, Sunak was told that if he worked hard and solved problems, he would succeed in life. But political reward is more hard won. One cabinet minister put it this way: “In his mind the deal he struck with the universe is not working out. He’s very clever, but he knows that with cleverness comes responsibility to graft … But if you work hard and do the right thing, the universe will reward you — and in his mind at the moment the universe is not keeping its side of the bargain.”

Shipman and Calver aren’t saying that Sunak himself has been moaning about cosmic forces conspiring against him; they are just quoting someone trying to sum up his state of mind. But if Sunak does privately believe that the universe has lined up with Boris Johnson in a conspiracy to do him in, then he will find two pieces of fresh evidence for that in the news this morning, both relating to immigration.

First, a group called the New Conservatives, around 25 “red wall” Tory MPs, are publishing plans designed to get net migration down to below 226,000 by the time of the next election. As Rajeev Syal reports, their ideas go beyond what the government is already doing. And their headline goal, which revives the promise in the Conservatives’s 2019 manifesto, serves as a rebuke to Sunak, because it highlights his recent decision to in effect abandon that target (or redefine it, to be more precise, but in practice that amounts to the same thing).

Second, the ConservativeHome website this morning has published a survey of Tory members suggesting that more than two thirds of them want the UK to leave the European convention on human rights. ConHome surveys are seen as a reliable guide to opinion in the party, and this creates another headache for Sunak. He has not ruled out leaving the convention. But unlike Suella Braverman, the home secretary, he has no enthusiasm for the proposition which, were it to be tried, might well split his party, and torpedo the UK’s reputation internationally.

In his write-up of the survey, Paul Goodman, the ConservativeHome editor, said he thinks Sunak may be forced into promising a “changed relationship” with the European court of human rights in the next Tory manifesto. He says:

I’ve suspected for some time that Rishi Sunak may be propelled into promising a changed relationship with the court during the run-up to the next election.

But even if he doesn’t, the scale of refugee movement in a globalised world, let alone that of illegal immigration, is likely to move European centre-right parties in that direction during the years and decades ahead.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10.30am: The high court resumes hearing the government’s legal challenge against the Covid inquiry’s demand to see unredacted WhatsApp messages from ministers.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

12.30pm: Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, holds a phone-in on LBC.

1pm: Lee Anderson, the Conservative party deputy chairman and a member of the New Conservatives, speaks at a press conference about the group’s call for tighter immigration controls.

After 1pm (UK time): James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, addresses a meeting of the EU-UK parliamentary partnership assembly in Brussels.

2.30pm: Suella Braverman, the home secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 3pm: Peers resume their report stage debate on the illegal migration bill.

After 3.30pm: MPs debate the economic activity of public bodies (overseas matters) bill, which is intended to stop councils implementing boycotts of Israel.

4pm: Amanda Pritchard, the NHS England chief executive, gives evidence to the Commons public accounts committee.

And at some point today the Cabinet Office will publish a written ministerial statement about Sue Gray with the title “Prima facie breach of the civil service code by the former second permanent secretary for the union and the constitution”.

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