Speaking earlier this morning, Work and Pensions Secretary Damian Green said it would be a “long and difficult” task to bring immigration down to “sustainable levels”, but insisted the Government remained committed to its manifesto target.
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During her first Prime Minister’s Question session at the House of Commons, May said she was committed to reduce the overall number of immigrant entries to the United Kingdom as one of the main pledges of the Brexit option.
‘This is what we were talking about in the referendum campaign.
Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham used an urgent question to raise the issue in the Commons today after Government minister Lord Keen suggested last week that the IPCC had launching an inquiry into events at Orgreave could conflict with its own ongoing investigation into the Hillsborough disaster.
“What the prime minister has said is that we must bring migration down to sustainable levels so that’s what is going to be my aim at the moment”, she told the BBC.
There is confusion over whether the British government has abandoned its pledge to bring immigration down the “hundreds of thousands” after Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said a concrete target would only “disappoint people again”..
Johnson added it was wrong to commit to numbers, because “one didn’t want to disappoint people”. May was only appointed as Britain’s new prime minister one week ago.
Today, Mrs May will fly to Berlin to see Chancellor Angela Merkel – with the issue of European Union migration and free movement certain to dominate.
When pressed on whether the net migration target had changed, Rudd responded: “I’m going to stick to my comment which is about bringing it down to sustainable levels”.
Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), in its “Migration Statistics Quarterly Report”, show that net migration to Britain in 2015 reached +333,000.
Net migration is calculated on the number of people who have migrated to the United Kingdom, less the number who have left. This compared with a figure from the rest of the world of 188,000.
Brexiteers seized on immigration as a key argument during last month’s referendum, arguing that Cameron’s failure to meet his own target indicated that being part of the bloc made it impossible for the United Kingdom to reduce migrant numbers.
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On top of this, some 1.49 million non-EU foreigners moved here in the last decade – a total increase in overseas residents of 3.44 million.
