Lords slam Immigration Minister for unacceptable lack of detail in response to Movement of People report

Government Departments are supposed to respond to Lords reports within two months of their publication dates. The Committee highlight that, in addition to being months overdue, the response failed to directly address many of the Committee's recommendations and conclusions and only partially addressed others.

The Committee point out that Parliament has a duty to scrutinise and hold the Government to account for decisions that will profoundly affect the people of the UK and do not feel that the response provided enables them to adequately to perform that role.

Lord Jay of Ewelme, Chairman of the Committee,  has asked Caroline Nokes for a direct response to the Committee's recommendations, an explanation as to why the response took so long, and a clarification of the Government's ‘red lines' on future freedom of movement arrangements with the EU.

The letter can be found here.

The report Brexit: UK-EU movement of people was published in March 2017 and examines possible arrangements that could replace freedom of movement as well as their implications. It made a number of findings and recommendations, including:

• The evidence base currently available to policy-makers responsible for devising a future framework for UK-EU migration is incomplete, in some cases insufficiently reliable, and dispersed across a range of sources that are not always directly comparable.
• This is an unsatisfactory basis from which to start developing policy, and also complicates scrutiny of future policies.
• The Committee warns that the evidence base to support or refute the Government's assumption that resident UK workers will fill the jobs vacated by EU migrant workers is simply not there.
• The Committee recommends that the Government focus on improving its evidence base before further entrenching the skills-based immigration policy that the UK operates in respect of non-EU nationals.