Business chiefs have hit back at Sir Keir Starmer’s plan to crack down on companies hiring foreign workers by warning that immigration is needed to fill jobs while British workers are trained up.
Stressing that firms “always prefer to recruit people locally rather than bring someone in from overseas as it’s faster, less complex and generally cheaper”, Ms Gratton went on: “Businesses are crying out for a slicker, more agile skills system – including high quality apprenticeships – that provides the technical training we need to drive growth.
Sir Keir refused to say this would amount to a revamping of ex-Labour PM Gordon Brown’s pledge of “British jobs for British workers”, but said companies have “for too long” had an “overreliance on the easy answer of recruiting from abroad”.He refused to put a figure on where net migration should land, but repeatedly castigated the Tories for a quadrupling of net migration since they last won an election in 2019, when it stood at around 184,000.