A minister has slammed the Tories’ legacy over migration, even though visa applications have just fallen.
The number of people applying for skilled worker, health and care, and student visas has dropped by more than a third compared to last year, dropping to 91,500.
It comes after Rishi Sunak’s government stopped those applying on those visas from bringing their families with them.
Labour says it has no intention of reversing this policy, despite the Tories being condemned for splitting families up when it was first unveiled.
Migration is therefore expected to fall significantly.
The news comes after a week and a half of far-right riots which extremists claimed were partially motivated by high migration levels.
But speaking to Times Radio on Friday, paymaster general Nick Thomas-Symonds said: “I don’t think that the Tory government, with its performance over the 14 years, deserves any thanks, frankly.”
He continued: “We should be clear, we welcome people coming in on visas, hugely welcome, and they bring extraordinary diversity and richness to our university sector, for example.
“And we are hugely grateful for the work that workers from overseas do in our health service.”
But, he added “it’s also hugely important” that along with people coming from overseas, “we also make absolutely sure that we do have skills that is linked to a strategy here” in the UK.
The minister admitted that migration levels remain a concern to some corners of the UK population.
Thomas-Symonds said: “It’s been coming up, on the doorsteps and throughout the general election campaign, the government was saying that, yes, the levels of migration are too high.
“We would expect them to come down, and of course, people’s legitimate concerns putting forward have been addressed.”
However, he made it clear those conversations are very different from the riots.
The minister said: “What I don’t accept is that the people putting forward those views were somehow doing them in an illegitimate way.
“They weren’t, they were having conversations on the doorstep. They were saying that to candidates who were coming before them on their doorsteps.”
He continued: “These were law-abiding people, law-abiding people on the doorstep who wouldn’t dream of behaving in the way that these thugs have behaved, and our focus now going into the weekend is both to ensure the criminal justice system continues to act swiftly, but also to ensure that we do have those additional thousands of specialist police officers available that can be deployed around the country.”