News in Brief

Immigration Hypocrisy

The previous Conservative Government spent much of its time in office telling the public that the country had to be tougher on migration. Not so, in reality, as it turns out, reports David Hencke.

An unexpected, unregulated influx of nearly 1.2 million overseas skilled workers entered the UK while Tory hardliners were in charge of the Home Office between 2020 and 2024, according to new findings by the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee.

Successive Home Secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, and Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick (pictured below), presided over new visa rules that recruited large numbers of workers without introducing sufficient safeguards.

The skilled worker scheme was then extended by Patel in February 2022 to include care home workers following the pandemic (which accounted for 648,100 of the applications), and continued under Braverman.