Will migration target be lowered?

JEREMY Hunt suggested yesterday that ministers will try to get net migration lower than 2 5,000 a year because the figure was ‘too high’.

Peers quizzed the Chancellor about the issue after the Office for Budget Responsibility last week forecast that net migration would settle at around 2 5,000 in the long-term. This was up from 129,000 forecast last year.

The fiscal watchdog also projected that 1.6million people will arrive in the UK over the next five years – 300,000 more than previously thought.

Appearing before the Lords’ Economic Affairs Committee, Mr Hunt acknowledged that growth in labour supply was being fuelled by immigration.

But when asked whether the 2 5,000 figure was ‘too high’, he suggested it was and that the Government was planning to reduce it below this.

He said: ‘If you want to change our economic model – which I think is what the country decided when we voted collectively for

Brexit – to a model that is not dependent on unlimited migration... then you have to have another plan.’

Mr Hunt, pictured, added: ‘I’m hoping that we will see, in future forecasts of migration, an economy that is less dependent on migration... I want to move to a high-wage, high-skill economy.’ It comes after the latest Census data showed that migrants are more likely to have jobs than native-born Britons. The Office for National Statistics found just 55.9 per cent of over-16s born in the UK were employed on Census day in 2021, compared with 70.8 per cent of those from the EU and 58 per cent from the rest of the world. Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants had the highest employment rates (80. per cent) while people born in the British Overseas Territories – including the Falklands, Gibraltar and Bermuda – had the lowest ( 5.8 per cent).