Keir Starmer has accused the Conservatives of running an “open borders experiment” after new figures showed that net migration to the UK hit a record high of nearly 1 million in a period covering Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak’s administrations.
The prime minister announced a deal with Iraq to tackle people-smugglers and a white paper to overhaul the visa system, before demanding “an explanation” from Kemi Badenoch for her party’s decision to “deliberately liberalise immigration” after the Brexit vote.
His accusation followed the release of official figures that showed the number of people entering the UK, minus those leaving, reached 906,000 in the year ending June 2023. The estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) were revised upwards from a previous estimate of 740,000.
At a Downing Street press conference, Starmer said the failure of successive Conservative governments to control the numbers entering the UK was “unforgivable”, adding: “Failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck. This happened by design, not accident.
“Policies were reformed deliberately to liberalise immigration. Brexit was used for that purpose, to turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders.”
His comments came after Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, signed an agreement with Baghdad to ensure close cooperation to tackle organised crime networks, a faster return of refused asylum seekers and the formation of a new taskforce aimed at breaking up migration routes to the UK..
A total of £800,000 of UK money would be spent on training, support for the Kurdistan regional government and on disruption of organised crime, the government said.
Smuggling networks operating out of Iraq and Kurdistan have been responsible for trafficking thousands of people, including across the Channel to the UK, according to the Home Office .
The deal will be of concern to human rights organisations amid reports of torture of detainees by Iraqi state agencies and unlawful killings. Corruption has been described by the LSE’s Middle East Centre as “the lifeblood of politics in Iraq”.
Cooper said the country had changed, telling reporters: “We have been very clear and explicit; in the statements that have been agreed is a commitment to international law, a commitment to international humanitarian law and commitments to international human rights standards.”
The Iraq deal follows Starmer’s praise for the hard-right Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, for making “remarkable progress” in cutting irregular migration after striking deals with third-party countries.
Under the agreement, Iraq has committed to ensuring people can be returned to Iraq more swiftly through closer cooperation between the two countries on speeding up the identity documents needed to prove they are from Iraq.
The UK will also pay Iraq to boost its capacity for dealing with people returning to the country, as well as for programmes to help returnees reintegrate into society.
This year Iraqis have made up the seventh-largest nationality crossing the Channel in small boats, with a total of 1,624 people arriving by September. The asylum grant rate for Iraqis in the UK was 38% in the year to March 2024.
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On Wednesday, Badenoch, the new Tory leader, admitted that her party had failed on migration. Starmer called for a fuller explanation. “[The Conservative party] want to wave it away with a simple ‘we got it wrong’. Well, that’s unforgivable,” he said.
The government would publish a white paper with a plan to reduce immigration, Starmer said, adding that he would target sectors seeking labour from abroad.
“We will reform the points-based system and make sure that applications for the relevant visa routes, whether it’s the skilled worker route or the shortage occupation list, will now come with new expectations on training people here in our country,” he said.
Responding to Starmer’s comments, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “We know the numbers are too high. That is why Kemi Badenoch has set out that under her leadership we will learn from past mistakes and adopt a new approach to lower immigration.”
The total for net migration in the year to June 2023 was revised upwards by 166,000. A similar change was made to the estimate for net migration in the year to December 2023, which was initially 685,000, and is now 866,000.
The ONS said that while net migration remained high by historic standards, it was beginning to fall.
Government spending on asylum in the UK was £5.38bn in 2023-24, up 36% from £3.95bn in 2022-23, Home Office figures show.
The ONS said it reviewed its net migration figures as more complete data became available and it had improved how it estimated the migration behaviour of people arriving in the UK from outside the EU.
