Home Office minister Laura Farris believes that immigration numbers will "fall dramatically", saying the rise in numbers are due to a "post-Covid spike" and "generous" schemes allowing refugees to come in from Ukraine and Hong Kong. Report by Blairm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 no doubt that the figures that came out last week were too high and we saw the predominant areas in
00:05 which reasons why people were arriving in the United Kingdom were either to either as students
00:10 or to work in the health and care sector. You know already that there is an issue with
00:15 dependents, the government's taken action on reducing the number of dependents a student
00:20 can bring in and sort of slightly buried in the figures was the ONS's prediction that that will
00:25 bring figures down significantly and that is starting to work. There was a post-Covid spike
00:31 and it's also the case actually that we've had some very generous and important refugee schemes
00:38 like the Ukraine scheme, the BNO passport holder scheme for British citizens in Hong Kong after
00:45 the Chinese crackdown and I think everybody would agree that they were the right things to do,
00:49 they were humane things to do that were consistent with our values but they did cause a spike in the
00:53 numbers. So look we're not at all complacent, we're rigidly focused on trying to bring numbers
00:59 down but I think you are right that there has been a temporary spike and that we hope and
01:04 expect that numbers will start to fall dramatically with new measures we're bringing in.