Latest updates: Keir Starmer to speak to CBI as party repositions itself over immigrant workers
According to the extract from Keir Starmer’s speech to the CBI released by Labour in advance, he will say that a Labour government would be “pragmatic” on the shortage of workers in the economy and would not ignore the need for “skilled people’ to come to the country. But he will go on:
But I want to be clear here: with my Labour government any movement in our point-based migration system, whether via the skilled occupation route, or the shortage worker list, will come with new conditions for business.
We will expect you to bring forward a clear plan for higher skills and more training, for better pay and conditions, for investment in new technology.
We are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills, and low productivity, all of it enabled and assisted by uncontrolled immigration …
The answer … is not to reach for that same old lever of uncontrolled immigration, to keep wages low.
The answer is to control immigration, to allow people of talent to come to this country, but not to use immigration as an excuse for failure to invest in people, in skills and in the equipment the facilities the machinery they need to do their jobs.
I would say on the issue of better pay and conditions in something like the care sector, we’ve got clear employment policies that we’ve put forward, things like fair pay agreements, which would drive up [pay] across the sector. [On] pay and conditions, there is no approach from the government at all on that. They have not even fulfilled their promise of an employment bill.
On things like better skills training, the apprenticeship levy was a good policy, but it’s led to a massive decline in the number of apprenticeships since it was introduced. Our policy to give businesses more freedom would, I think, strengthen apprenticeships, but also allow them to spend some of that levy on other forms of training.
