Both the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph go big this morning on the Centre for Policy Studies’ new report on the potentially astronomical long-term cost of granting Indefinite Leave to Remain (and eventually citizenship) to the hundreds of thousands (and if things continue, millions) of people whom this country has imported since Boris Johnson and Priti Patel first unleashed the ‘Boriswave’.
Indeed, the Telegraph is even kind enough to run the headline ‘Taxpayers face ‘astronomic’ £200bn cost of Labour’s migration failure, Badenoch warns‘, which lays all the blame at the Government’s door despite Patel’s extraordinary decision to defend her post-Brexit immigration policy on Harry Cole’s show.
Regardless, action is definitely needed. As the paper notes, the CPS’ research found of the Boriswave migrants that “the cumulative bill for the extra services and benefits they required, compared with the taxes they would pay, would come to £243 billion over their lifetimes”, and that “households face a long-term bill of £8,200 each to fund extra services for 800,000 recent arrivals”.
Kemi Badenoch is quite right, therefore, that we need to “end the conveyor belt to a precious British passport”, even if in truth we should have done that a long time ago if the share of foreign-born people in social housing (most of whom represent an abject failure of immigration policy even if they have been given citizenship) is anything to go by.
If anything, the Conservatives’ new proposals don’t go far enough:
“In her first major policy announcement last week, Mrs Badenoch said migrants should only become eligible for ILR after 10 years in the UK, rather than five. Under the plans, migrants would only be granted indefinite leave if they had been working, claimed no benefits and were “net contributors” to the Exchequer over that decade.”
Whilst an improvement, this is a very bare-minimum set of restrictions. The most obvious problem is that whilst it would doubtless improve the selection of people put on the citizenship pathway, it still has no guarantee with regard to lifetime net contribution.
If policymakers believe we’re going to have to keep importing a large volume of labour for the foreseeable, the obvious move is to abolish the automatic pathway from residency to ILR to citizenship altogether. Make the norm a contingent residency based on economic need and contribution, with the expectation that people return to their country of origin after making their money.
Such a system can have exceptions, specific mechanisms or criteria by which people can be granted citizenship in particularly deserving circumstances. But it shouldn’t be the norm. Badenoch’s policy also invites questions which seem a good jumping-off point for further reform. Why, for example, is someone who hasn’t even got ILR even eligible for any sort of welfare?
Regardless, it’s a good start, and assuming Labour fights off the bid to amend the Border Security Bill it will at least be a stick with which to beat the Government for the next few years – although if the Conservatives really want to restore their tattered credibility on immigration, they should go further and pledge to rescind ILR from people they don’t think should have received it if they win the next election.
But this story also highlights one other thing. This move has been described in the papers as Badenoch’s “first major policy announcement last week”; but weren’t we supposed to be waiting two years before we got any of those? Weren’t they supposed to follow the big, comprehensive review off the previous government’s policies and where they went wrong?
The point isn’t that she shouldn’t have made this intervention, but that the previous policy was never going to be sustainable. Like it or not, a party can only campaign with things to campaign on, and cannot long attack government policy without any idea what it would do differently.
Having bitten the bullet and made one commitment, it’s going to get harder to hold the line in other policy areas. The longer Badenoch takes to articulate her agenda, the greater the pressure to start making piecemeal commitments on individual issues and end up having it articulated for her by events.
Sometimes, as in this case, those policies will be good ones. But others will be misjudged; good for winning a few headlines in the moment but poor policy a future Tory government would be unwilling or unable to implement. As Labour discovered when it (rightly) decided not to pay £10bn to the WASPI women, such lazy opposition opportunism can come with a steep political price tag.