Brown orders foreign visa clampdown

Nov 12 2009

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced a review of student visas to clamp down on people applying to study in the UK with the intention of working illegally.

The review, reporting next month, will consider whether visas should be granted only to foreign students on degree and postgraduate courses and stopped for those seeking to take shorter courses leading to lower-level qualifications.

Mr Brown also announced plans for a reduction of thousands in the number of posts on the Government's shortage occupation list.

This allows foreign workers to can gain access to the UK because of a lack of local people with the skills to do the jobs.

He announced that hospital consultants, civil engineers, aircraft engineers and ship's officers are being removed from the list of in-demand occupations which Britain needs to recruit from abroad. And he said that during next year, the list would be narrowed further, with the Migration Advisory Committee considering the case for removing more engineering roles, skilled chefs and care workers.

Local workers will be given additional opportunities to secure available jobs, with the extension from two to four weeks of the period for which they must be advertised in JobCentres before employers seek to recruit overseas.

In his first major speech on migration for almost two years, he said: "As growth returns, I want to see rising levels of skills, wages and employment among those resident here, rather than employers having to resort to recruiting people from abroad."

Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said: "Gordon Brown's speech had a completely hollow ring to it. This is the Government that tried to cover up a deliberate policy of increasing immigration and the Prime Minister's comments show that he has no idea about how to deal with the whole question of immigration now."