Starmer unleashes furious attack on 'unforgivable' Tory 'open border experiment' as he vows huge immigration crackdown

Starmer told a press conference: "Time and again the Conservative Party promised they would get the numbers down. Time and again they failed.

"A failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck, it isn’t a global trend or taking your eye off the ball. No, this is a different order of failure. This happened by design, not accident."

The Prime Minister said that Labour will will "turn the page" on the issue and announced a deal with Iraq that he claimed will tackle people smuggling upstream "before it reaches our shores."

He said: "I’m pleased to announce today a new security agreement between Iraq and the UK. This is a world first, that will help us smash the people smuggling gangs and secure our borders.

"The Home Secretary has been out in Iraq to seal this deal, and we’ve also announced funding for Iraqi law enforcement to tackle this problem upstream, way before it reaches our shores.

"We’re also tackling the utter mess we inherited in the Home Office."

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The Prime Minister announced he would be reforming the points-based system and crack down on abuse of visa routes.

He told the press conference: "We will publish a white paper imminently, which sets out a plan to reduce immigration.

“The migration advisory committee is already conducting a review and where we find clear evidence of sectors that are overreliant on immigration, we will reform the points-based system and make sure that applications for the relevant visa routes, whether it’s the skilled worker route or the shortage occupation list, will now come with new expectations on training people here in our country.

"We will also crack down on any abuse of the visa routes. For far too long, we’ve been casual about malpractice in our labour market, which sends a clear signal overseas that we’re a soft touch. Well, no more – our rules will be enforced. Any employers who refuse to play ball, they’ll be banned from hiring overseas labour."

The Prime Minister hit out at the previous government as a 'loss of control' since they won the 2019 General Election.

He told a press conference: “When you say people have been let down, you are absolutely right because they were promised by the last government that we would get control of our borders and we had a government that completely lost control of our borders.

"This sort of increase is unprecedented. It is off the scale what has happened in four short years. The way to get it down is the hard graft, not the gimmicks but the hard graft of driving it own on the skills agenda, migration advisory committee, making sure we are cracking down on employers that are breaking the rules."

The Prime Minister earlier described the situation as "really stark", and claimed numbers had quadrupled since 2019.

He added: "This isn’t immigration that has gone up by a few thousand. This is policy under the last government that has driven immigration up to record levels, a complete loss of control."

Responding to today's announcement, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp MP said: "If Keir Starmer really cared about bringing down net migration, he would not have suspended our increase to the family visa salary threshold and scrapped the deterrent the National Crime Agency said we needed, which were part of our reforms to bring down the numbers down.

"Keir Starmer has no credibility on this issue. He has ruled out a legal migration cap and since he became Prime Minister channel boat crossings are up 23 per cent. And we learnt today that 6,000 more asylum seekers are in hotels - despite Starmer’s promise to end hotel use”

"We know the numbers are too high and that is why Kemi Badenoch has set out that under her leadership, we will learn from past mistakes and adopt a new approach, to lower immigration. This means a strict cap on numbers, making citizenship a privilege not a right, zero tolerance for foreign criminals and an effective legal deterrent for illegal migration.

"It is abundantly clear that Keir Starmer, a man who believes immigration controls are racist, has no plan and no desire to tackle the high levels of legal migration, nor will he confront illegal migration."