Details, please

Theresa May interpreted the EU referendum vote as a demand for less immigration. But it is at least arguable that what most people want is an immigration policy that works best for the country – which may or may not mean less of it.

As Home Secretary, the now Prime Minister presided over a target for reducing net migration to the “tens of thousands”, which, as we argued at the time, was both a hostage to fortune and perverse since it was dependent upon levels of emigration.

The problem with such a target is that when shortages of manpower develop in areas like the NHS, it becomes difficult to address them because caps prevent the import of foreign workers. The two obvious ways of dealing with this – to abandon a rigid target and remove students from the immigration figures – were resisted by Mrs May.

Now, however, Sajid Javid, the new Home Secretary, is trying to slice through the Gordian Knot. As we report today, he is to exclude doctors and nurses from the Tier 2 visa cap and will allow businesses and employers in other sectors to recruit thousands more high-skilled migrants, including teachers and IT specialists, effectively increasing the non-eu cap by 40 per cent.

This feels like the beginning of a significant change to Government policy set out in the Conservative manifesto, and one that needs to be carefully explained to the country. After Brexit, assuming free movement of people ends as intended, there needs to be a significant rethink of the country’s immigration policy. A long-promised white paper setting out how this might work has so far failed to materialise. As with so much about Brexit, we need to see the details.