The high level of legal migration to the United Kingdom since Brexit has been “a complete disaster” and “a betrayal to voters”, Robert Jenrick says in this interview.
Jenrick, who resigned in December as Immigration Minister after failing to persuade the Prime Minister to take tougher measures in the Rwanda Bill to curb illegal migration, will contend in a forthcoming pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies, written jointly with Neil O’Brien and entitled Taking Back Control, that legal migration is even more damaging.
In this interview, Jenrick declares that the wrong policy on legal migration was pursued after the Brexit vote, the decisions made then “were two fingers up to the public”, and “mass migration of the kind that we’ve experienced in recent years is actually making the country poorer”.
He argues that business and universities should concentrate on equipping British workers with the necessary skills, and should kick the “drug” of importing foreign labour and students.
And he says of the Conservative Party:
“I think there is a lack of ideas and energy in the party today, and if I can contribute in any way to setting out a different path then that’s what I see my role as.”
Jenrick rejects the idea that to think through its policies the party needs a period in opposition, and instead calls on the Government to do as much as it can in “the precious time we’ve got remaining”.
Canadian Conservatives have appealed to young voters by promoting policies to end the housing crisis, and Jenrick urges British Conservatives to do so too, by cutting through planning regulations.
He reiterates his proposal that the international aid budget be cut in half, with the money instead spent on renewing Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
He also calls on the Government to be much firmer in resisting claims for the restitution of the Elgin Marbles and other treasures in British museums, condemns his old college, St John’s, Cambridge, for cutting one of its choirs, and reveals the secret of the Jenrick Diet.
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ConHome: “What is the argument you now wish to make about legal migration?”
Jenrick: “Although I resigned at the time of the publication of the Rwanda Bill, to me legal migration has always been the more important issue.
“The numbers are just so large that it has a proportionally much greater impact on everyone’s lives. This cuts to the housing crisis, why we have such low productivity, why we have concerns about community cohesion and integration.
“So many different strands of politics and life today come back to the scale and pace of legal migration. I’m 42, and for my entire adult life, if not longer, political parties of all persuasions have stood at elections saying they’re going to bring down the level of legal migration.
“Not just Conservative governments but if you look back to the public statements of Tony Blair, his Home Secretaries, your David Blunketts, Jack Straws, John Reeds.
“All alighted on this challenge, said they were going to take action, and all ultimately failed.
“For years, politicians made promises to cut legal migration they knew they couldn’t keep because ultimately the UK was beholden to the EU’s freedom of movement.
“The great reform was the Conservative Party delivering Brexit, which finally took back control of the levers of migration. But the decisions made in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote were a betrayal to voters – they created a system that was even more liberal than the one before by lowering the salary threshold, creating a graduate route and an unregulated social care visa.
“Frankly, these decisions were two fingers up to the public and in public policy terms they’ve been a complete disaster.
“As Immigration Minister I fought and won a package to reduce net migration by 300,000. I viewed this as a positive first step, but it was clear to me that wasn’t enough and that we had to go further if we were to meet our manifesto commitment. I didn’t believe there was any appetite in Government to go further and I wasn’t willing to be another politician who failed to fulfil their promises to voters, so I didn’t feel I could continue my position in Government.
“I’ve been clear that the only way to ensure we meet our promise to voters on legal migration is to have a cap on numbers. That would serve as a democratic lock on our immigration policy.
“The Government’s modelling of the benefits of immigration has consistently overlooked the fiscal costs arising from pressure on housing, public services and welfare. That’s the ideological consensus I want to take on. The mass low-skilled migration we have experienced has in fact been a burden on the taxpayer. What we need is radically reduced, highly-selective, high-skilled and high-productivity migration.’
ConHome: “So what are you going to do differently?”
Jenrick: “What we’ve tried to do in this report is analyse the problem, make the case economically as well as culturally, I do believe there’s a serious cultural issue, that the pace of change is just too fast and that is placing huge strain on some communities.
“As Communities Secretary I saw there are parts of this country where people are leading increasingly segregated lives. It’s not just seen in the protests since October 7th, but there are many other examples.
“What we wanted to do is take on the economic argument that we’ve been sold as a country for 30 years, which is that legal migration is an unalloyed good and that you need to have this tap on of foreign labour to boost the economy.
“I don’t believe that’s right and the report sets out to disprove that and to show that far from making us richer, mass migration of the kind that we’ve experienced in recent years is actually making the country poorer.”
ConHome: “Many cases could be cited of individual migrants who’ve made an enormous economic and also intellectual and cultural contribution to this country.”
Jenrick: “Of course. We’re not saying there should be no immigration to the UK. What we’re saying is that we want to have highly selective immigration, where we choose people and types of people to come to this country who will make an economic contribution.
“Our argument is that we simply haven’t done that, and in particular we haven’t done that since Brexit.”
ConHome: “So who have we been getting in the last few years who are not making an economic contribution?”
Jenrick: “Well let me give you the overall statistic. Just 15 per cent of non-EU migrants who came to the country last year came on work visas. So the overwhelming majority of people were students, dependants, were those coming as refugees.
“And one can make arguments for and against each of those categories, but they’re not people who are demonstrably making an economic contribution to this country.”
ConHome: “Well the students are paying university fees, presumably.”
Jenrick: “Yes, but I think the types of students that we have been gaining in recent years are quite different from the ones we had in the recent past. The expansion of the student population over the past few years has primarily been in short courses at less reputable universities.”
ConHome: “Do you mean these are bogus courses basically?”
Jenrick: “Yeah, well, the most obvious example would be a one-year business administration course at a lesser university with a high dropout rate where individuals bring dependents and stay on, but don’t stay on to do a job which to any of us would be considered a graduate level job.”
ConHome: “What do you think the public appetite is for the actual costs of the transition? In the short term you would cut off import of labour, you would hike labour costs, which businesses would oppose.
“You would make some universities non-viable, and those universities, whatever you may think of them, are important ways of distributing public funds to left-behind towns and they play an important role in local economies.
“The costs of things like social care would go up if wages had to increase to hire more British workers into those jobs. And to date, while every government has said it will bring down immigration, none has been prepared to have the Treasury, the Department of Business, the Department of Education on board with that mission.
“What’s your way round that? Why are you going to succeed where all those previous governments failed?”
Jenrick: “Well I think it’s a battle we need to engage in, because the economic model that we’ve become hooked on isn’t working. If importing hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to the UK was a route to prosperity, the UK would be one of the richest countries in the world.
“Instead, for almost the last two years we’ve had a recession in GDP per capita, and that’s all that really matters to me. I care about the prosperity of our own citizens, not the overall size of the economy.”
ConHome: “Absolutely. But just thinking about the politics of it: if you do this, there are specific winners from the current system, or at least there’ll be specific losers from any change. Are you prepared to let universities go under? Businesses go under?”
Jenrick: “Firstly, if you want to meet the productivity challenge the country faces, then you have to take on the free flow of low-skilled wages, or else you will never encourage businesses to embrace technology, skilling up the domestic workforce.
“Secondly, we have a major welfare challenge as a country. We now have nearly nine million economically inactive people, and as the Prime Minister alighted on last week we’ve got a growing issue with people who are off work due to mental health and other forms of sickness.
“You’ve got to concentrate on encouraging those people back into the workforce rather than reaching for the easy lever of imported labour.
“So I think you have to have these battles.
“We have a big and growing welfare problem which is an economic and a moral issue. We have a massive productivity challenge which in honesty we’ve not managed to successfully address over the past 14 years.
“And on your point about universities, I do think that if you look at our education policy since 2010 we’ve had huge success at primary and secondary level, great credit should go to Michael Gove and Nick Gibb and the other champions of raising educational standards.
“But we have not taken on higher education and universities, and I think that model is broken today.
“And there are a number of universities that seem to be more focussed on attracting international students, often to do poor quality degrees, than they are on providing excellent education and good value for money for British students.
“And some of our more local and regional universities should be focussed on upskilling their local and regional workforce and economy rather than setting up a campus to attract international students to do one-year courses of limited utility. That just seems to me to be fundamentally wrong.
“We just need to be willing to say difficult things to business at times. Too many of our businesses have become hooked on the drug of imported foreign labour.
“We’ve put construction jobs on our shortage occupation list. We’ve done comparatively little to work with the sector to boost training for young people in our own country to take on those jobs.”
ConHome: “Turning to illegal migration, you resigned because the Prime Minister wouldn’t take your advice on how to reduce it. Do you now think you’re having greater influence by being able to express yourself with greater freedom in the House, in numerous articles, and above all in interviews with influential websites [laughter].”
Jenrick: “I’m not sure Number 10 would have allowed me to do this interview!
“It was a sad decision to leave office, not one I took lightly, but I had a profound disagreement with the Prime Minister about the direction of policy on both legal and illegal migration.
“What I’ve tried to do since is to make a series of arguments not just about migration but about the future direction of the Conservative Party.
“I think there is a lack of ideas and energy in the party today, and if I can contribute in any way to setting out a different path then that’s what I see my role as.”
ConHome: “Would a period in opposition help? If you’re in government you have very little time to think, whereas Margaret Thatcher had four years in opposition to start to work out what to do.”
Jenrick: “I’m very sceptical of those people who argue that the party would enjoy a period in opposition. I joined the Conservative Party in 1997, aged 16, and those long years in opposition were incredibly frustrating ones.
“Those people who suggest it would be good to be in opposition are foolish. We should use every minute that we have of the months ahead before the general election to do as much good as we possibly can for the country.
“What can we do now, in the precious time we’ve got remaining?”
ConHome: “Why is the Government lacking in energy on policy?”
Jenrick: “We have to do everything we can to win back those 2019 voters who are now saying they might vote for Reform, and to persuade those undecided 2019 Conservative voters that this party, this Government deserves their vote.
“There are too many Conservative voters who don’t think we have delivered for them, and don’t feel motivated to vote Conservative at the moment.
“The number one thing we could do is go further on legal migration. As a result of leaving the European Union we have control of the levers of migration for the first time in my lifetime, and we have not used those levers well.
“I think we could do more on housing in the time remaining.”
ConHome: “Every leader of the Conservative Party since Sir Robert Peel has known of their primary duty to keep the party together. On housing, there are a great many people who are worried that if we have a more liberal approach to planning, the Lib Dems are coming for them.
“You obviously, as Housing Secretary from 2019 to 2021, were taking forward Boris Johnson’s policy, with an 80-seat majority and the Prime Minister’s full backing, and yet the party could not pass that.
“If you had your time again, what would you advise Boris Johnson to do differently?”
Jenrick: “Firstly, I do think it was a huge missed opportunity not to proceed with those planning reforms. I think Boris would acknowledge that himself.
“I think it is a contributor to the low growth we have seen, and to the very worrying loss of votes and support from young people. The latest polling suggests the age at which people become Conservatives has now risen to 70. We have to change that. It’s incredibly bad for the country and it’s an existential threat for the Conservative Party.
“It is possible for Conservatives to secure the votes of young people, as we see from the Canadian Conservative Party, which appears to be on the cusp of power and defeating Trudeau, and part of their message has been housing, where they have set out a very pro-housing approach.
“I would like the party to capture the spirit of the Canadian Conservatives as part of its revival in the months ahead.”
ConHome: “Well they’ve got Pierre Poilievre, who is a brilliant speaker actually. Who have we got?”
Jenrick: “In the way we approach the housing challenge we should learn from the way he’s presented it.
“This is not just a question of supply. It’s also a question of demand. And since I was Housing Secretary I have clearly become more concerned by immigration.”
ConHome: “Yes, but the supply side is essential, and Macmillan did that after 1951. Even if we had a complete pause on migration tomorrow we’d be four million houses short. Are you going to concrete over the fields round Amersham?”
Jenrick: “No, but I think a lot of the YIMBY movement, which I’ve got a great respect for, has drawn the link that I have between the housing crisis and immigration. You’d have to build a house every five minutes, day and night, purely to keep up with the level of net migration to this country.
“I think you do have to return to planning reform, because the planning system remains sclerotic. It’s a wider issue that affects our ability to build anything at all, whether that’s roads, railways, labs for the life sciences industry around Cambridge.
“I mean recently you saw the Lower Thames Crossing, for that we’ve spent £300 million on just the planning stage, without a single shovel going into the ground.
“The planning system is severely holding back the economy.
“I do think you could approach planning reform in a sequential manner. Caution is not the enemy of change, it’s an essential component of change. We considered whether to pilot them, for example, in particular parts of the country that might be more amenable to them than others.
“There is a big issue in cities. There’s clearly more you can do in urban areas, for example in inner east London where there is a huge amount of brownfield land.”
ConHome: “Why is the Government so reluctant to use Development Orders? Under Section 59 of the TCPA 1990 the Secretary of State can grant permission to a specific project, and you could use that to target cities.
“And under the Planning Act 2008 you can just give permission for the Abingdon Reservoir. That could have happened a decade ago, and it’s in a Liberal Democrat constituency. Why is it that a Conservative Government is allowing the south-west of England to have avoidable drought every summer because we won’t build a reservoir that the Secretary of State has the power to authorise?”
Jenrick: “You make a good point. We should be willing to use the powers that we have on critical national infrastructure like reservoirs.”
ConHome: “You’re a lover of history. How worried are you that bodies like the National Trust have yielded to a self-hating conception of our nation’s history?”
Jenrick: “Yes, I’m very concerned that a wide range of institutions have been hijacked by left-wing ideologues who don’t seem to love our country, its heritage and traditions.”
ConHome: “Which other institutions did you particularly have in mind?”
Jenrick: “Some of our universities, for example.”
ConHome: “You were at St John’s College Cambridge, which recently decided to disband the St John’s Voices choir. What do you think about that?”
Jenrick: “I haven’t spoken publicly until now.”
ConHome: “Come on, now’s your chance.”
Jenrick: “I think it’s a real tragedy. The people who run these institutions are custodians of something that’s taken generations to create, and they seem incredibly careless.
“I believe you should be handing on these great institutions enhanced, not depleted.
“I don’t think we’ve been assertive enough in defending the conservative point of view when it comes to culture and to institutions. I wrote an article earlier in the year about museums and the Elgin Marbles.”
ConHome: “You made the point that foreign governments seeking restitution become importunate in their demands when they sense weakness in London.”
Jenrick: “I think there is a lack of self-confidence in the country generally, and the Government needs to be clear that we don’t believe in sending works of art to other countries.
“If the Government is firm then institutions will take a lead from that. Too often in government we’ve been willing to sacrifice our principles and bow down before mostly liberal left-wing elite views, and the chickens are coming home to roost now, and that’s a great shame.”
ConHome: “You want higher defence spending. What would you cut?”
Jenrick: “I’ve made a particular proposal, which is that we halve international aid spending, and direct that money to the defence budget.
“I think that in a world of hard choices the UK should fulfil its international role by defence spending rather than international aid.”
ConHome: “And spend it on what?”
Jenrick: “I’m particularly focussed on the state of our nuclear deterrent. I’m very concerned by everything that I read about the state of our nuclear submarines, the fact that we only today have two viable subs, the other two are inactive.
“We’ve got to ensure that we get our new fleet of submarines built as quickly as possible. There is a very real risk that our nuclear deterrent will be denuded in the near future.
“At the moment the efforts to replace Trident are cannibalising the rest of the MoD’s budget.”
ConHome: “One last question. You’ve lost a lot of weight. What is the secret of your diet?”
Jenrick: “It turns out that exercising more, and eating less, fewer takeaways on A1 service stations between London and Newark, have worked a trick.”
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