Yvette Cooper explains plan to end immigration and asylum 'chaos'

Every minister in this newly elected Labour government has a story to tell about the chaotic mess their Tory predecessors left behind.

But as Home Secretary, most of the damage was there for all to see.

The Tories left us in the middle of the worst year ever for small boat arrivals, almost twenty per cent higher in the first six months of 2024 than over the same period in 2023.

The asylum system was in chaos. Record numbers of people were in limbo waiting for decisions, and £8 million of taxpayers' money was being spent every day on hotel accommodation.

Net migration had been allowed to treble from 2019, driven heavily by a big increase in overseas recruitment, even while training and skills here in the UK were cut back.

Engineering visas had nearly doubled, while completed engineering apprenticeships had nearly halved. That was a clear sign of failure both on the economy and on immigration.

Then there was the money, or lack of it. Police officers had been recruited, but with no money set aside to give them a pay rise next year.

And yet £234 million, I learned, was spent by the Tory-led Home Office last year on consultancy services, almost double what was spent in 2022/23, and ten times what was spent just five years ago.

Given the state of things that Conservative Ministers had left behind, I found myself asking: what on earth did they do all day? Not very much seems to be the answer.

It certainly wasn't trying to tackle shop theft, knife crime and antisocial behaviour, or cutting our country's appalling rates of violence against women and girls.

But they did have one priority, of course: Rwanda.

They spent £700 million of taxpayers’ money to send just four volunteers to Kigali. All that, but no sign whatsoever of the deterrent effect the Tories said it would have on small boat Channel crossings.

Just another hugely expensive mess to add to all the rest.

Now it's down to Labour to start clearing it all up. It's going to be hard, and it's going to take time, but step by step, we are determined to turn things around.

On small boats, that means getting our new Border Security Command up and running, recruiting 100 new officers to the National Crime Agency this year to work on disrupting and dismantling the criminal smuggling gangs, and immediately increasing cooperation and joint investigations with the governments and law enforcement agencies across Europe who can help us in that task.

On asylum, it means transferring hundreds of staff who were deployed on the fantasy Rwanda scheme back into real world operations, increasing enforcement of the rules, processing asylum cases and ensuring that those people with no right to stay in the UK are returned to their home countries instead. Returns flights geared up to deliver the highest number of removals during any six-month period over the last five years.

On immigration, we're continuing with new visa controls, but we know that is not enough. To deal with the root causes of the steep increase in net migration under the Tories and strengthen our economy, we have to tackle the skills shortages in key sectors like engineering, IT and social care which have left too many employers recruiting staff from overseas when we should be training people here at home.

None of this is glamorous work, none of it is easy, none of it makes for cheap headlines on the evening news. Maybe that's why ministers in the ever-increasing chaos of the last Conservative government never got round to doing it.

But Labour will, as part of the Prime Minister's pledge to ensure we are a Government in the service of the British people once again.

We won't stop working until we have rebuilt our border security, got our asylum system back under control, and taken the practical, sensible steps we need to bring down net migration and make the economy and immigration system work together.

That's what grown-up government looks like. And it's what our country at long last deserves.