Government proposals to bring down migration and outlining new rules for foreign worker visas will be published in the new year, the Home Secretary confirmed on Tuesday.
Yvette Cooper said the plan would lay out a workforce strategy for Britain and how some industries can be less reliant on foreign labour.
After Labour won power at the general election in July, the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) was commissioned to review the financial requirements of the family visa immigration rules and the number of foreign workers in certain sectors, including IT and engineering.
Ms Cooper told the Home Affairs Committee: “Our plan is to to publish a white paper in the new year that will set out how we bring migration down, and will set out in much more detail about how we want the new system to work...how you just have a much more coherent approach to the labour market, how you link the work of Migration Advisory Committee with those other organisations as well.
“So that does need to then link into other organisations through from universities, training bodies and so on, and also recognise particular sectors, social care, for example, we need a proper workforce strategy for social care.
She accused the previous Conservative government of effectively setting up a “free market approach to the labour market and to migration”, which allowed employers “to be able to just recruit from wherever they wanted”.
“What you got was employers recruiting from overseas, when actually what we should have had was much more of a workforce strategy here in the UK,” Ms Cooper said.
Data suggests that immigration has begun to drop after hitting record levels. The last Government introduced new visa rules, which banned many people coming to work or study here from bringing family with them and requiring higher wages.
Ms Cooper added: “Alongside the visa controls, what we want is to also see much stronger links to look at where you need skills training or other workforce policies in the UK.
“One of the things that we've done is to ask the Migration Advisory Committee to look particularly at IT and engineering, because those are sectors where we know there's been high levels of recruitment from abroad, and actually look in much more detail at why have there been such high levels of recruitment from overseas, and what more could be done swiftly to actually address some of those issues.”
It comes after the Home Secretary pledged to tackle exploitative and illegal working in the UK and stop abuse of the visas system.
The Home Office confirmed that 13,500 people with no right to be in Britain have been removed since the July 4 general election.
New figures show illegal working operations and arrests are up by almost a third on the same period last year.
Six employers have also been charged with employing illegal workers in the last five months, compared to just four in the two and a half years previously.
