Eight months ago, Robert Jenrick and Neil O’Brien were serving ministers under Rishi Sunak. But both are now out of government and keen to show where their former colleagues are going wrong. The two backbenchers today published a big paper on migration with the Centre for Policy Studies. It calls for the Home Office to be broken up to create a new ‘Department of Border Security and Immigration Control’.
The aim is to get the number of legal arrivals to Britain down to the ‘tens of thousands’ – a target which has eluded every Tory leader since David Cameron. Speaking at the report’s launch in Westminster, both Jenrick and O’Brien were keen to stress their emphasis on policy, rather than party politics. Yet with net migration currently at 672,000, few issues are of greater concern to Tory MPs: rightly or wrongly, politics is at the heart of this debate.
The CPS report sets out 36 recommendations which range from eye-catching initiatives like abolishing the graduate visa route to drier proposals such as a ‘Whitehall-wide examination of data recording and transparency.’
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