Yvette Cooper MP: Strengthening our borders.

Yvette Cooper MP writes: The whole immigration and asylum system was left in total chaos by the previous Conservative government – with legal migration hitting a record high, gangs left in control along the Channel, the asylum system broken, and the rules not enforced.

Most people I talk to round here are appalled by the chaos and this multi-million pound criminal smuggler trade in people. Frankly it should be governments not gangs who decide who can enter this country. We need a properly controlled and managed system where the rules are respected and enforced.

That’s why since the election, the Labour government has been working to deliver a practical plan for change – step by step to strengthen UK borders, increase enforcement and returns, bring migration down and We are restoring order to the system so it is a properly controlled and managed system.

Already since July we have substantially increased returns to their highest rate for six years. 19,000 people who have no right to be in the UK have been returned in the last seven months, including a 21 per cent increase in foreign criminal removals, a 24 per cent increase in enforced returns, and charter flights to countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Instead of the previous government’s extortionate £700m gimmick to send just four volunteers to Rwanda, these are serious and workable plans.

We’ve also increased illegal working raids and arrests by 38 per cent. Immigration Enforcement officers are being given new body cameras and biometric kits so they can take fingerprints and evidence on the spot and can immediately check whether people have the right to work.

And we are strengthening action against unscrupulous employers who disgracefully exploit migrant workers to pay pittance wages and undermine legitimate businesses in the local economy too.

This week, we voted for the new Border Security Command and to bring in new, stronger, counter-terror style powers so that law enforcement can crack down on the gangs. That includes powers to seize and search mobile phones when people arrive on small boats in order to trace the smugglers who organised them, and powers to go after those who are organising the boats, engines and routes. And we are working closely with France and Germany who are also strengthening their laws because the gangs should have nowhere to hide.

But we also need reforms on legal migration too. In the Conservatives last four years in power, legal migration more than trebled as employers were encouraged to recruit from abroad while training and apprenticeships were cut here in the UK. That is a broken system. We are determined that net migration must come down while UK training and apprenticeships go up.

For generations here in Yorkshire, our communities have welcomed people coming here from overseas to work in our public services, set up new businesses or fleeing persecution – from the Hungarian miners who came to work here in the pits in the 1950s to the many nurses and doctors in our local NHS, or Ukrainian families fleeing Putin’s invasion. But that is exactly why it is so important that the system that is fair, controlled and properly managed, where the rules are properly respected and enforced and public confidence can be restored.