Britain adopts Australian immigration policy

The UK is planning an Australian-style system in which migrants are give extra points if they agree to live in unpopular areas.

Priti Patel wants to spread skilled migrants around the country by awarding a higher score to those willing to work in low-income areas. Picture: AFP

Migrants seeking to move to Britain after Brexit will be given extra points if they agree to take skilled jobs in northern England and coastal towns.

British Home Secretary Priti Patel is considering preferential treatment for those willing to live and work in less prosperous areas outside of London and southeast England.

She is planning an Australian-style points-based system under which people would be scored on their education, salary level, skills, age and willingness to work away from the capital.

An immigration bill, which will be one of 22 bills in the Queen’s speech late on Monday, will focus mainly on plans to end the free movement of EU citizens.

Ms Patel wants to spread skilled migrants around the country by awarding a higher score to those willing to work in low-income areas. Whitehall sources say the aim is to ensure that deprived regions as well as areas that have taken in many unskilled migrants receive a fair share of skilled workers.

In recent years, schools in deprived areas have struggled to recruit teachers, and parts of the Midlands, Humberside and the northeast of England have had difficulty in recruiting GPs.

“The immigration bill will be mainly about ending freedom of movement but extra points for migrants going up north is something we are thinking about,” a Whitehall source said.

Some campaigners said it might be difficult to persuade people to stay long in a poorer area before being lured away by higher salaries. Alp Mehmet, the chairman of Migration Watch UK, which campaigns for lower immigration, said: “The government will find, as the Australians and Canadians have, that such schemes do not work. People tend not to stay in the jobs which they first take up and move to where life is more appealing and money and conditions are better. We should train our own people instead of taking the easy option of foreign labour.”

In Australia, more than 60 per cent of migrants who settled in some regions moved on within five years, research from the Australian National University found.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will this week offer EU leaders a historic grand bargain on Brexit — help deliver his new deal this week or agree a “no-deal” departure by October 31.

Mr Johnson was to relay the message in phone calls on Tuesday to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.

Mr Johnson’s intervention comes on the eve of a crunch week for his premiership ahead of a Brussels summit on Thursday and a Saturday sitting of parliament next weekend, the first since the Falklands War of 1982.

Diplomats say Mr Johnson wants to enlist Mr Juncker and the German and French leaders to press chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier to agree the details of the skeleton deal thrashed out with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar last week.

Under the plans on the table, Northern Ireland will remain legally in Britain’s Customs union but gain some practical benefits of membership of the EU Customs union.

If Mr Johnson walks away from talks with Brussels, his predecessor Theresa May’s failed Brexit deal could be put to another vote of the House of Commons.

Rebel Conservatives are understood to have held talks with Labour, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National Party MPs about a plan to break the deadlock in parliament.

Under the plan, if talks in Brussels collapse and the Benn Act is successful in securing an extension to negotiations, MPs would then try to seize the initiative from the government. Rather than accept an early election, they would try to put Mrs May’s withdrawal agreement to a fourth vote subject to a confirmatory referendum.

They believe that they have the support of a “significant” number of Labour MPs who fear that their party could be wiped out in a Brexit general election.

The Times