Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp welcomed a 20% drop in net migration to 728,000 but called the figure “far, far too high.” Philp criticised Labour for suspending Conservative policies, including family visa restrictions, and pledged a "hard cap" on migration with a focus on high-skilled workers. He also blamed successive governments for decades of policy failures, promising detailed plans to reduce numbers significantly. Report by Covellm. 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, I'm glad that they've come down by 20% compared to the previous year.
00:03That's thanks to some changes made by the previous Conservative government.
00:07But being truthful, these numbers are still far, far too high.
00:11And that is why Kemi Badenoch and I gave those speeches yesterday,
00:15acknowledging the mistakes of successive governments over decades
00:19in allowing net migration to get this high.
00:21That is why we need a new approach.
00:23We need a hard cap on numbers.
00:25We need to move away from mass, low-skill, low-wage migration
00:30towards a much, much lower, limited number of high-skill, high-wage migrants.
00:36Labour have wrongly suspended some further measures that we announced in government
00:40that were due to come into force in April of next year, April 2025,
00:44that would have further restricted the availability of family reunion visas.
00:50They suspended that measure.
00:51That was a mistake because that measure would have reduced the numbers further.
00:54Labour were wrong to suspend that.
00:55They were also wrong to cancel the Rwanda deterrent before it even started.
01:00And as a result of that, illegal migration across the English Channel
01:04has gone up by 23% since the election compared to the previous year.
01:09So Labour have made those mistakes already.
01:11They voted against measures to control illegal migration 134 times in the last Parliament,
01:18including voting against measures that saw longer prison sentences
01:23for people smuggling gangs.
01:25So Labour have a bad record on this and they certainly can't be trusted.