Minister who dares to speak the truth: IDS exposes Cabinet tension, warning the majority of jobs created in Britain go to foreigners"
- Duncan Smith exposes Cabinet tension over immigration
Iain Duncan Smith will urge British businesses to give young people coming off welfare and back into employment a fair chance"
A new generation will be condemned to a life on benefits without tougher measures to stem the flow of migrant workers, Iain Duncan Smith is to warn today.
The Work and Pensions Secretary will lift the lid on simmering Cabinet tensions over immigration, telling David Cameron that expensive back-to-work schemes will fail without strict controls on incomers.
He will also urge British businesses to give young people coming off welfare and back into employment a fair chance, and ‘not just fall back on labour from abroad’.
The former Tory leader’s warning comes as figures reveal that Britain’s population increased by nearly half a million last year, driven by high levels of immigration and rising birth rates.
In a speech today, he will highlight statistics suggesting that more than half of new jobs in the past year have been taken by foreigners, and say that Labour’s failure to ensure ‘British jobs for British workers’ risks being repeated. ‘In the short term, controlling immigration is critical, or we will risk losing another generation to dependency and hopelessness,’ he will say.
Mr Duncan Smith’s intervention is a highly unusual public warning to the Prime Minister not to give in to Liberal Democrat demands for a softer stance on immigration, an issue that remains close to the top of voters’ concerns.
Earlier this month, Mr Cameron complained that the Lib Dems are preventing him from taking stronger action to crack down on immigration and force benefit claimants back to work.
Today Mr Duncan Smith, speaking to a centre-Right think tank in Madrid, will attack Labour’s record on immigration and welfare.
The last government left five million people on sickness or jobless benefits, many of whom were capable of working but ‘seemed either unable or unwilling to do so’, he will say.
The former Tory leader's warning comes as figures reveal that Britain's population increased by nearly half a million last year, driven by high levels of immigration and rising birth rates"
Official figures show that over a million have spent the last ten years claiming at least one of the three main out-of-work benefits.
As a result, Mr Duncan Smith will say, businesses looked elsewhere for labour, bringing in people from abroad to do jobs that could have been done by Britons.
Between 1997 and 2010, more than half of the rise in employment in the UK was accounted for by foreign nationals, while the welfare system was ‘perverted’ so that it rewarded the idle.
The Government’s new work programme, which is being run by private firms and voluntary organisations, is designed to force a million jobless into welfare-to-work schemes.
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‘Even as our economy starts to pick up again, and jobs are created, there is a real risk that young people in Britain won’t get the chances they deserve because businesses will continue to look elsewhere to fill their posts,’ he will say.
While Mr Duncan Smith accepts that Britain’s membership of the EU means free movement of workers from the Continent, he will point out that significant numbers arrive from outside the EU.
‘In the years 1997 to 2010, around half of the rise in employment accounted for by foreign nationals was accounted for by those from outside the EU,’ he will say.
David Cameron complained earlier this month that the Lib Dems are preventing him from taking stronger action to crack down on immigration"
‘That’s why we must take tough action on this to tighten the rules on immigration across the major entry routes – work, student visas and family settlement – so that only those who have something clear to offer to the UK are able to come in.’
The Work and Pensions Secretary will welcome the Government’s new annual limit on the number of non-EU workers allowed into the country each year, saying it has finally brought ‘some sanity to a system which has been allowed to run out of control’.
But in what will be seen as criticism of the Home Office, he will suggest the focus on prioritising skilled migrants is a ‘red herring’.
‘Actually, a good proportion of foreign nationals in jobs in the UK are in semi or low-skilled occupations,’ Mr Duncan Smith will say.
‘And we know that a significant proportion of those coming into the UK purporting to be high-skilled workers have actually been doing low-skilled jobs once in the UK.
‘We have to ensure that our immigration system works in the interests of Britain.
‘This Government is reforming welfare to make work pay, and to help people back to work, and we are toughening sanctions against those who refuse to take jobs when they are available.
‘If we do not get this right we risk leaving more British citizens out of work, and the group who will be the most affected are young people.’
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