Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp calls for a "binding annual cap on legal migration", describing Labour's plans on immigration as "a little tweak" which will have "very little impact". Report by Blairm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00Well it's going to have very little impact. By Ivette Cooper's own admission, it'll only reduce
00:04net migration by about 50,000. The changes the last Conservative government made, late in their
00:09time in office, perhaps too late, reduced net migration by 400,000 to 500,000. So what the
00:16Labour announced today is really just a little tweak. We think we should go further and have a
00:20binding annual cap on legal migration, voted for each year by Parliament, and we're going to put
00:26that to a vote in Parliament tomorrow, but I fear Keir Starmer and Labour will vote against our plan.
00:33I think there was a lot of lobbying by business and industry to allow large volumes of low-skill,
00:39low-wage migration, but I think actually that was counterproductive economically because I think
00:44it's made our productivity flatline because instead of investing in technology and mechanisation and
00:49automation, businesses instead imported low-skill migration, and I think governments made a mistake
00:54in the past by giving in to that pressure. We also, of course, have 9 million people of working age
01:01here in the UK who aren't working, and instead of importing lots of cheap labour, we should instead
01:08be getting people that live here already back into the labour market.
01:12Thank you very much.