Speeches by Murray.

“This is my final question. One of the analyses coming out of the Home Office is that, essentially, in the British immigration system, we do not make very much distinction between types of migrants. As long as you are here, you do not commit a serious crime and you do not leave the country, you are inexorably eligible f…”

“I just want to check I have understood you. Are you saying that, if you kept charging people visa fees for another five years of ILR, you do not think that actually adds up to very much?”

“That is really interesting, and it takes me to my follow-up question. Is my interpretation right here? Net migration peaked a couple of years ago at just over 900,000. As that cohort of people inexorably move through the time periods they have been here, they will start hitting the point at which they become eligible f…”

“That is really interesting. I suppose what I am trying to drive at here is: what would be the benefits of saying to migrants, “Okay, if you get indefinite leave to remain, you can stay here indefinitely, and you can move around different jobs, but you cannot claim benefits or some of the things that you get with ILR. T…”

“That is a totally fair point. The point I am driving at is that the immigration system in the UK is pretty agnostic about whether someone who comes here ever becomes a citizen. If you are in the UK, you can leave and things like that with citizenship, but you do not actually get any benefit from citizenship—there is no…”

“Sticking with the proposal on indefinite leave to remain, am I correct in thinking that there is not much distinction at all between indefinite leave to remain and citizenship? The only one would be voting, and if you are a Commonwealth migrant, even that does not make a difference. So the system does not draw any dist…”

“Very briefly, you referred to the establishment of the Fair Work Agency. Do you have a view on how effective that is going to be in tackling exploitation—on migrants specifically, not in the wider labour market? Are you making recommendations to Government about how it should be set up or structured?”

“I have one small follow-up on that. What is the evidence on the impact of the changes to family migration on different ethnic groups in the UK? Obviously, a lot of family reunification in some communities can involve arranged marriages and things like that. What is the evidence of the impact in different communities?”

“The Home Office is fine, but what about other Government Departments?”

“That is interesting. My final question was going to be: how supported do you feel by the Home Office in doing your job effectively, particularly given your expanded remits? I am wondering whether you are saying that you want to be supported with better data.”

“Do you think that has long-term implications for policy?”

“Do you feel the Home Office responds constructively when you either make a recommendation or set out the parameters? Is the interpretation of the data from you fair? Do they make decisions that you think are robust and can be defended, or do you not agree on that?”

“That is super interesting. I get that this is a redesigning of the architecture of Government for how these decisions are arrived at, but can you say with any certainty, at this stage, whether it will have a meaningful output? If enough sectors come to you with credible reasons why they cannot train domestically and yo…”

“I want to ask some questions about the role of the MAC but, to stick on the topic of the labour market evidence group, can you talk me through how your teeth are going to work? Will it just be that sectors that do not submit a good enough plan do not get to recruit, so they must improve their plan before they can recru…”

“More broadly, I wanted to ask you about the balance of the relationship between Home Office Ministers and the MAC. Thinking of the advice you are asked for, how political do you think your decisions are? How do you balance that relationship when pushing back on being asked to make political decisions?”

“The Home Affairs Committee this week released a report into asylum accommodation and it is utterly damning. In 2019, the Conservative Government bound the country into asylum contracts that have been disastrous for local communities, disastrous for asylum seekers themselves and disastrous for the taxpayer, but they hav…”

“Thank you. I will expand to the other two.”

“This is a question we asked our previous panel. I understand Prevent has its flaws: there is a lot of mistrust around Prevent in the community and the extremism picture is totally changing, as you have set out. But one of the advantages of it is it is quite embedded. People know what it is. Something that schools and s…”

“I will ask one very quick follow-up. It is related to online spaces and back to comm networks. Is age a factor in this? Are we seeing it particularly prevalent among young people—I know we will come on to this—particularly on those comm networks?”

“You have all mentioned several times about nihilistic extremism. Would I be correct in drawing the distinction between that and ideological extremism? Can you talk a bit about what narratives fit into nihilistic extremism? Some of the evidence we have heard is that common to everything are undercurrents of misogyny, of…”