Andy Burnham has admitted it was “difficult to say” whether immigration was too high, but stopped short of ruling out a cap on how many people come to the UK.
The Prime Minister’s remarks come as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is expected to water down her long-awaited immigration reforms today.
“When you have planned migration, it’s difficult to say if it’s too high or too low,” Mr Burnham said.
He argued that migrants help plug “gaps in the economy” and that placing hard caps on numbers could hamstring the country.
“If you just put a number on it, then we may have a shortage in a certain area, and then you’re saying, ‘Well, we can’t recruit people’.”
The Prime Minister insisted to ITV that Britain’s control of immigration, both legal and illegal, was “in a much better place than it was”.
Net migration, the difference between the number of people arriving in the UK and those leaving, fell to 171,000 in the year ending December 2025.
This was sharply down from a peak of 944,000 just two years earlier.
The Prime Minister’s remarks come as his Home Secretary is expected to offer care workers a fast-track exemption from the toughest new settlement requirements.
Under the planned reforms, most skilled workers would face a decade-long wait for indefinite leave to remain, double the current five-year threshold.
ILR grants holders the right to live, work and study in Britain without restriction and to claim eligible benefits.
The lowest-paid migrants, including those in the care sector, would confront an even longer 15-year qualifying period.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:
- Shabana Mahmood accused of ‘surrendering’ to Angela Rayner in migrant crackdown U-turn
- Andy Burnham under fire after taxpayer-funded jet flew from Stansted to Manchester to pick up PM
- Small boat migrants working in Britain illegally ‘can sue their bosses under Labour’s new laws’
Ms Mahmood had pursued the reform as more than a million migrants who arrived under the so-called “Boriswave” are set to receive settled status.
New analysis from the Institute for Public Policy Research estimated that skilled migrants and their adult dependants, settling under existing rules, would generate a net lifetime fiscal contribution of about £115 billion through tax payments.
The IPPR said its findings, calculated using the same methodology as the Home Office, suggested the influx would cost the public purse £10 billion over their lifetimes.
However, the Home Secretary is understood to be considering allowing care workers to “earn” reductions to their waiting time through public sector service, mirroring arrangements for higher-skilled professionals such as doctors.
Under this mechanism, a care worker who had spent five years in the public sector could reduce their 15-year wait by five years.
It would represent a major dilution of Ms Mahmood’s initial promises, following pressure from left-wing Labour collegues to liberalise her planned reforms.
Housing Secretary Angela Rayner publicly condemned the prospect of applying the new rules retrospectively, branding such changes “un-British” before she returned to Cabinet.
Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh also repeatedly declined to support extending the qualifying period for settlement.
In September, she remarked that the proposals would have made things “tough” for her own family, who arrived in Britain as refugees.
More than 100 Labour backbenchers are also believed to be demanding changes.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Diane Abbott, Clive Lewis and other Labour MPs called on the Government to amend the planned changes, branding Ms Mahmood’s proposals as “Windrush era policies”.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp accused Ms Mahmood of “surrendering” to Ms Rayner with the apparent climbdown.
“It’s clear Shabana Mahmood has been forced to surrender to Angela Rayner and the open-borders Labour left,” the Tory frontbencher said.
“She will now allow hundreds of thousands of low-wage and no-wage migrants to stay in the UK forever and claim benefits.”
Our Standards:
The GB News Editorial Charter