May’s £30k salary threshold for new migrants to be scrapped

THERESA MAY’S £30,000 salary threshold on migrants is to be scrapped to meet demand for skilled workers into Britain after Brexit, under proposals to be published next week.

The earnings level was a centrepiece of Mrs May’s attempts to control migration, but the Cabinet decided yesterday that the policy will be ditched as it will not fit with Boris Johnson’s plans for an

Australian-style points immigration system. It will be replaced with what Downing Street sources described as a more “nuanced” system following complaints from universities and business that the current £30,000 threshold is too crude.

Downing Street also confirmed that the Government’s proposal of phasing in border control changes next year will be ditched, with the replacement system due to be rolled out in full in January 2021, as revealed this week in

The Sunday Telegraph. The plans are likely to lead to a rapid fall-off in lowskilled migrants as ministers design a system aimed at attracting the “brightest and best” from not only the EU but the rest of the world.

The changes will be foreshadowed next week by the Migration Advisory Committee. It is also expected to detail proposals for the new points system under which migrants will be scored on their education, salary level, skills, age and willingness to work away from

London in northern England and coastal towns.

Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, is understood to want to spread skilled migrants around the country. Whitehall sources say that the aim is to ensure that deprived regions as well as areas that have taken in many unskilled migrants receive a fair share of skilled workers.

In recent years schools in deprived areas have struggled to recruit teachers, and parts of the Midlands, Humberside

and the North East have had difficulty in recruiting GPS.

Mr Johnson set out his “key guiding principles” which will underpin the new system at a meeting of his Cabinet yesterday. Legislation enacting the system is expected in March.

The Prime Minister gave a cast-iron commitment that unskilled immigration would be reduced under the new system, while the overall number of people moving to the UK would also be cut. A No 10 spokesman said: “The

Prime Minister and Home Secretary set out how the Government will introduce a system that welcomes talent from around the world that means we can support our key sectors such as the NHS, but also takes back full control as we leave the EU.”

Mr Johnson has dropped Mrs May’s pledge to reduce immigration to the “tens of thousands”. EU net migration stands at 48,000 a year, while non-eu migrants rose from 224,000 last year to 229,000 in the year to June 2019.