The Business Secretary Dr Vince Cable has told the BBC's Political Editor Nick Robinson that the government ‘certainly won’t achieve’ its target of reducing UK net migration to below 100,000 before the next election in 2015. The comments were made in an interview to be broadcast as part of the upcoming BBC Two documentary ‘The Truth About Immigration’ which airs at 21:30 on BBC Two on Tuesday 7th January.
A transcript is below.
Nick Robinson: "So that target, is it in any sense achievable?"
Vince Cable: "In our view, certainly the Liberal Democrats view, it’s not sensible to have an arbitrary cap because most of the things under it can’t be controlled. So it involves British people emigrating - you can't control that. It involves free movement within the European Union - in and out. It involves British people coming back from overseas, who are not immigrants but who are counted in the numbers. So setting an arbitrary cap is not helpful, it almost certainly won’t achieve the below 100,000 level the Conservatives have set anyway, so let’s be practical about it."
Nick Robinson: "The government’s target is a bit of a nonsense, then, isn’t it?"
Vince Cable: "I wouldn’t use the words nonsense, but the idea it should come down to 100,000 is something the Liberal Democrats have never signed up to because we simply regard it as impractical."
Shadow Immigration Minister, David Hanson, responding to Vince Cable's comments on immigration, said: "Vince Cable is right to say that the Prime Minister's net migration measure is actually rising and not falling to the tens of thousands as he promised. He could also point out that the Home Office's obsession with the net migration target ignores illegal immigration and is actually pushing migration into less controlled routes. This gap between the Government's rhetoric and reality on immigration is continuing to undermine public confidence.
"As Business Secretary Vince Cable could also be making the changes we have called for and need now. He could be working on improving enforcement of the minimum wage, tightening recruitment agencies recruiting solely from abroad, stopping them paying less and extending gangmaster legislation to new areas - all of which are issues of basic fairness but which would also make sure that local workers are not excluded from job opportunities and that migrants are not unfairly exploited in a race to the bottom. However he and this Government have so far refused to act on any of these areas in any meaningful way."
