Immigration Controls

My hon. Friend is precisely right. It has indeed been a decade of incompetence and in his honest moments, the new immigration Minister admits it—[Interruption.] All his moments are honest, but the problem is that he honestly appears to believe different things on Saturday than he does on Sunday. What we need, and what we have proposed, is a range of measures to establish firm and fair immigration controls to the benefit of people in this country and, ultimately, to the benefit of new arrivals in Britain as well. Let me make some concrete proposals, which I suggest the Minister and the Home Secretary could adopt. A Conservative Government would set an annual limit on the number of people from outside the EU who are allowed to come here to work. Such a limit would aim at a substantially lower inflow than we have had in recent years. Economic benefit would be the key test on which individuals would be admitted and the limit would take account of wider societal effects such as housing, public service provision and community cohesion. Most years, we would expect there to be a positive level of migration into the UK, but it would be substantially lower than current levels. The limit would be set after consultation with employers, local authorities and major public service providers—[Interruption.] Ministers sat on the Front Bench are chuntering hard about consultation. I appreciate that they do not like listening to other people, but if they knew their own policies, they would know that they set up the migration advisory committee and the Migration Impacts Forum precisely to get the information—it is useful to have it—that would allow us to set a limit. Our policy is very similar to what happens in Australia, which has a points-based system, but also a limit.