Robert Jenrick said: “We have delivered this package, but we need to go much further.” ; Photo: David Rose
Robert Jenrick said Rishi Sunak only embarked on a package of measures to reduce net migration after threatening to resign as immigration secretary.
In an interview with Allison Pearson for The Telegraph On the Planet Normal podcast, Mr Jenrick said the Prime Minister had been «completely uninterested» in legal migration during his year in office.
This was a repeat of similar accusations previously made by Suella Braverman, the former home secretary business this week.
In November, official data emerged showing net migration had reached a record high of 745,000 in the year to December 2022, increasing pressure on the government to take action. They followed Ms Braverman's resignation as home secretary.
Mr Jenrick said: “I think the prime minister was completely uninterested in this issue and would not even discuss it either with whom. He only discussed this with me when I made it clear that it was not viable and I would have to leave government if we did not resolve this within a few days.
“We have really put this package of measures together, but we will have to go much further. This is not enough.”
Mr Jenrick is reported to have made the threat ahead of the December 4 announcement by James Cleverley, the then new home secretary, of a package to cut legal migration by 300,000 people .
Just 10 days earlier it emerged that Mr Jenrick was pushing a five-point plan to reduce migration, including raising the wage threshold at which foreign workers would be allowed into the UK, limiting visas for care workers and banning entry into the UK . dependents and the abolition of the missing occupation list.
Cleverley's statement to the House of Commons included Jenrick's measures, although it did not limit the number of visas for care workers.
Downing Street disputed the claims on Wednesday evening, saying Jenrick was involved in a two-week inventory of the department. with Mr Sunak.
The source noted that in May the government announced the «biggest ever» restrictions on students, limiting the right to bring dependents to research students only, wondering how the policy would have changed if legal migration were not on the table.
Listen to Allison Pearson's full interview with Robert Jenrick on the Planet Normal podcast:
In his interview, Mr Jenrick also criticized the liberalization of legal migration after Boris Johnson became prime minister and passed Brexit.
“I was frankly outraged that some members of the government were not controlling the huge numbers of people coming in both legally and illegally,” he said. “Particularly on legal migration, which in some respects because of its scale is the most important, I felt that, frankly, we were pointing two fingers at the British public.
“Members of the public voted in election after election and, of course, in the Brexit referendum, for controlled and limited migration — and yet we did the exact opposite of that.»
«We made catastrophically bad decisions after Brexit that created a migration system that was even more liberal than the one we had when we were members of the European Union.»
Mr Jenrick said that this worsened the housing crisis and depressed wages. and led to a lack of social cohesion.
He suggested that Britain's continued membership of the European Convention on Human Rights was «unsustainable» because it limited the country's ability to secure its borders. Deportation flights to Rwanda have been blocked since Strasbourg judges issued an injunction in June 2022.
Mr Jenrick said the ECHR was “unreformable”, adding: “I think it is very difficult to see way forward and this debate will now continue and evolve.»
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