Let the regions take control of migration

Britain’s one-size-fits-all policy has left the North struggling to cope with the influx of new people

This Government has learnt nothing from Brexit. The vote to Leave was partly a collective heave against Westminster’s liberal immigration stance. It should have triggered a radical overhaul of a system which suits metropolitans who subsist on Uber and foreign nannies, but irks regional towns disquieted by a shrivelling sense of identity and rotting infrastructure. Was the referendum not a loud enough wake-up call for an elite which has preferred to luxuriate in the caricature of the xenophobic northerner than heed people’s concerns?

Only in October – more than two years after the vote – did the PM break the regal silence that has become her hallmark, and finally promise that EU citizens will no longer be given priority to live and work in Britain. On non-eu migrants, or the strain on the welfare state in many places, she has offered nothing of value. Who will be surprised if new figures, showing a drop in the number of EU nationals working in Britain, merely become cause for further official complacency?

Meanwhile, the system lurches from calamity to calamity, with the latest a warning that the understaffed borders are an open door for illegal immigrants. Liberal Londoners might greet such stories with a shrug, but outside the capital they are reason for despair. Our one-size-fits-all immigration policy is failing the places that are least capable of managing the mass movement of people – the poorer regions outside London, and particularly the North.

In fact, a showdown between the capital and the regions is already nigh, over the admittedly separate issue of housing asylum applicants. The majority are shipped to England’s poorest parts. And last week, Greater Manchester’s mayor Andy Burnham threatened to block his patch from taking any more, echoing the warnings of council leaders from Yorkshire to Sunderland that the dispersal programme, which houses people waiting to find out about their refugee status, is on the brink of “catastrophic failure”. They fret that a new round of asylum housing contracts tendered by the Home Office will spell fresh waves of people. Mrs May’s constituency in Berkshire hosts no such accommodation, of course.

The story has a musty familiarity. Local authorities have long protested the funnelling of asylum seekers away from the South. When EU migrants surged from 2004, poor towns were left adrift while London tutted about the rise of Ukip. This distant disdain is traceable as far back as the 1960s, when media stories of undercut wages were eclipsed by café bans on “coloureds” in Wolverhampton and burning crosses in Smethwick.

Northern authorities should grind the Government into ditching their chaotic voluntary dispersal system for fair, obligatory national quotas.

Local bodies should be allowed to commission asylum seeker housing, not the Home Office, giving towns more say over where it is built. And why not let areas plagued by skills gaps grant asylum seekers the right to work while their claims are processed?

It would be just the start of a shift towards devolution of immigration policy. This isn’t so outrageous.

It was the only decent idea in an

All Parliamentary Group on Social Integration paper, among the dreary clutter of recommendations about cash for English classes and building “welcome centres”. Instead of having population change forced on them by London, the North would have its own quotas, bespoke to its economic needs.

It might look to Japan for inspiration, a country that dislikes immigration, but due to its ageing population has confirmed a plan to recruit half a million foreign workers. Only migrants qualified in the likes of medicine and law will be allowed in. We should do the same, with a devolutionary twist – region-specific visas would allow areas to hand-pick migrants to suit their requirements. Newcastle might focus on techies to drive its new digital hub; Wakefield on “creative industry” bright sparks and farming areas could offer six-month visas for seasonal hands.

All roads lead back to Brexit, and “regional visas” would have to be part of the EU talks. But when Mrs May’s slipshod withdrawal deal unleashes calls from the North to be untethered from Westminster’s incompetence, such ideas may finally get the air time they deserve.