Business secretary says she supports stronger measures as details are published of former home secretary’s alleged deal with PM
At the Covid inquiy Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has just started giving evidence. I will be covering the highlights, and there is a live feed at the top of the blog.
Rishi Sunak has just delivered a speech at the opening of the global investment summit. Mostly he focused on what he described as the strengths of the UK economy, but his speech also illustrated why immigration is such a difficult topic for the government. While people worry about high immigration numbers because of the pressure on housing and services, there is also a strong economic case for more immigration, and Sunak told his audience that the UK wanted to see high-flyers move to Britain. He said:
We don’t have a monopoly on talent in this country. And we recognise that nearly half of our most innovative companies have an immigrant founder. So if you’re an innovator and entrepreneur or researcher, you should know that the most competitive visa regime for highly-skilled international talent is right here in the UK.
And let me just give you one example. Our new high potential individual visa means that, if you’re a young person who’s graduated from a global top 50 university, you can just come to the UK and stay here with your family for two years to just explore, work, study, invent. Nothing like that exists anywhere else in the world, and it tells you everything about our pro-innovation, pro-growth, pro-business philosophy.
