Tories tell British business to use ROBOTS instead of cheap migrants

British businesses and farmers should be using more robots rather than relying on cheap foreign labour, Tory frontbencher Chris Philp said today.

The shadow home secretary lashed out after new net migration figures showed an astonishing under-estimate of the crisis facing the country under the previous government.

The record has been smashed again with 906,000 now thought to have been added to the population in the year to June 23.

Official data covering the 12 months to June this year show long-term immigration was 728,000 higher than those leaving the country. In itself that was almost as much as the previous record.

This morning Mr Philp, who was a senior minister at the Home Office at the time, called for more investment in technology and automation.

'In some other countries they use a lot more automation, a lot more technology rather than simply importing a lot of low wage migrant labour,' he told BBC Breakfast.

'So, to give an example, in Australia and New Zealand they are rolling out robotic and automated fruit and vegetable picking equipment, in South Korea they use nine times the number of robots in manufacturing processes compared to us, in America they use a lot more modular construction which is much faster and much more efficient.

'There's a lot of things British industry can do to grow without needing to import large numbers of low wage migrants.'

Official data covering the 12 months to June this year show long-term immigration was 728,000 higher than those leaving the country. In itself that was almost as much as the previous record.

But the bar has been dramatically shifted upwards by the Office for National Statistics, with net migration for the year to June 2023 now thought to have been 166,000 above the initial estimate of 740,000.

The ONS attributed the radical shift to more complete data and improvements in how it estimates the behaviour of people arriving in the UK from outside the EU.

The scale of the inflows - with the peak roughly equivalent to adding two cities the same size as Leicester in a year - immediately sparked a fresh political row. Numbers from outside the EU have exploded since 2021, after the Brexit deal took effect.

The five biggest sources of immigration have been India, Nigeria, Pakistan, China and Zimbabwe. In the year to June 2023, 268,000 arrivals came from India alone.

Kemi Badenoch used a major speech last night to insist the Tories would not allow Britain to be treated like a 'hotel' for migrants.

But Labour claimed it is 'clearing up the mess' left by the former government.

Mr Philp declined to put a figure on Conservative proposals for a cap on immigration today, but said net migration figures of 350,000 would be 'much too high'.

Speaking before the figures were released, he said: 'The OBR forecast in the Budget a couple of weeks ago was about 300,000 or I think 350,000, somewhere around there, and I think that is too high, significantly too high as well.

'So you're beginning to get a flavour of where we're coming from, 350,000 is much too high as well, but what I'm not going to do is sort of continue to go down until you hit the number because we do need to do the work properly to understand exactly how many high skilled, high wage people we need, how many people are coming here to do proper degree courses, not using degree courses as a sort of parallel migration system which has been happening to an extent so far.

'So we do need to do that work in detail, I'm not going to shoot from the hip, but I have given you a sense of two of those numbers that are definitely too high and we'll be coming in significantly below those.'