No 10 is attempting to sideline home secretary Suella Braverman in order to loosen immigration rules, exposing a damaging cabinet split over how to kickstart the economy.
Liz Truss is keen to hand out more visas to achieve the growth she needs to save her premiership – but is facing open defiance from Ms Braverman, a hardline Brexiteer, who insists tough curbs are needed.
Now The Independent can reveal that business leaders pushing for more foreign workers to plug huge labour shortages have been urged to ignore the Home Office and lobby other departments instead in their efforts to build the case for relaxed rules.
Two sources said they were told to put their evidence to the business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, or to Nadhim Zahawi, the Cabinet Office minister – in preparation, it is thought, for No 10 to overrule Ms Braverman, who is supposed to be in charge of a review of the work visa system.
One senior business figure said: “We were told not to approach the Home Office but to state our case to Rees-Mogg. It’s extraordinary. It seems that Downing Street is already trying to bypass a home secretary who was appointed only a month ago.”
One business group raised the alarm over the failure of ministers to speak with one voice, warning that high fees “price out” nearly half of small firms seeking to employ skilled staff who are not from the UK.
Tina McKenzie, policy chair at the Federation of Small Businesses, told The Independent: “Small businesses need joined-up thinking from the government on immigration, to bring in policies that will help them employ global talent as they have been struggling with widespread labour shortages.”
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said it was clear that Ms Truss and Ms Braverman were “at loggerheads” over immigration policy and “much more”. The split is “adding to the impossible chaos & confusion at the heart of this Tory Govt”, she tweeted.
The extraordinary bid to bypass Ms Braverman comes after the home secretary made herself the leader of a right-wing pushback against the prime minister’s plan to ease restrictions on workers from abroad.
The idea is among a range of “supply side reforms” No 10 wants to unveil in the next few weeks as part of its much-hyped Growth Plan, alongside the deregulation of areas such as planning, housebuilding, workplace rules, financial services and childcare.
The package will be crucial to convincing the Office for Budget Responsibility that Kwasi Kwarteng has a plan to tackle soaring debt – which he must do in order to avoid a further market meltdown and attacks from worried Tory MPs.
But Ms Braverman is resisting an expansion of the shortage occupations list – a list of the sectors that are subject to looser immigration rules – to include everything from engineers for infrastructure projects to florists, hairdressers and town planners.
A big boost to the seasonal workers scheme, which allows up to 40,000 fruit and vegetable pickers to come to Britain for up to six months, could allow foreign workers to stay for longer periods.
But Ms Braverman told the Tory conference she wants a return to David Cameron’s ill-fated target to cut net annual migration to “tens of thousands”, to fulfil a Brexit promise.
The former chair of the hardline Brexiteer European Research Group told an interviewer: “I campaigned to leave the EU because in part I wanted migration to fall.” She added: “We’ve got the levers in place. We have new visa routes and the power to control who we want to come to the country. I think we should start exercising that power.”
To the alarm of many Tories, net migration is running at 230,000 people a year, and the number of visas for foreign nationals to live, study and work in the UK has topped one million for the first time.
But Matthew Fell, the CBI’s chief policy director, said the government must “update the shortage occupations list by the end of the year to enable economic growth”.
“The Migration Advisory Committee should look again at adding additional roles to the list where there are severe shortages across the labour market – as they did with adult social care,” he said.
And Jane Gratton, head of people policy at the British Chambers of Commerce, called for an expansion to include more jobs for skills below the standard of A-level and advanced apprenticeships “where there is clear evidence of a critical national shortage that is damaging the economy”.
