Businesses should be using more robots instead of hiring low-paid migrants, the shadow home secretary has said.
The Conservative MP Chris Philp says other countries “use a lot more automation” for tasks such as picking fruit and vegetables “rather than simply importing a lot of low-wage migrant labour”.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast, he called for more investment in technology to reduce the UK’s net migration figures.
Philp said: “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.”
At an impromptu press conference on Wednesday, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, said her party had got it wrong on immigration. She promised a review of “every policy, treaty and part of our legal framework” including the role of the European convention on human rights (ECHR) and the Human Rights Act.
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She said her party still believed in a “deterrent” to irregular migration but did not commit to restoring the Rwanda scheme scrapped by Labour, even though Philp called for it to be reinstated two weeks ago. He said on Thursday that Labour had “cancelled the Rwanda scheme before it even started”.
Philp was asked about reports that under the Conservatives, ministers had been examining using a giant wave machine to deter Channel crossings. He told the BBC: “I don’t recall ever having seriously looked at that idea. I can’t remember if someone else did.”
Badenoch committed to a “strict numerical cap” on migration and said the Tories would “explain how you get to those numbers”.
Philp declined to put a figure for this cap, but said net migration figures of 350,000 would be “much too high”.
Philp told the BBC: “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. I’m not going to shoot from the hip.”
He said the Tories would be examining migrants’ eligibility for benefits among other areas.