Labour's left it too late to get a grip on immigration

Bit by bit, the Government is increasingly talking about immigration in terms that mirror what the Conservative Party has been saying with consistency for years. But is this just the latest ministerial spin, as subsequent Home Office rowing back suggests or does it herald a genuine U-turn on a decade of failed policy? For like the current economic turmoil, the failure to control immigration to Britain is largely a problem of the Government's own making.

For a long time ministers buried their heads in the sand, ignoring the problems that uncontrolled immigration was steadily building up. Net immigration has quadrupled under Labour, fuelled both by the lack of transitional controls on new EU member states and a failure to control economic migration from outside the EU. Britain is on course to have the largest population in the EU, with the Office for National Statistics predicting that half of this surge will come from immigration.

Of course, some economic immigration brings benefits but not all. The Government has consistently overstated the economic advantages by emphasising only the contribution of newcomers to overall GDP, when, as the Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs points out, it is the impact on GDP per person that counts, and immigration has had only the most marginal impact on that measure.

Naïve about the advantages, the Government has ignored the full extent of the costs of immigration. The Governor of the Bank of England says uncertainty about immigration numbers makes the job of setting monetary policy more difficult.

The strain on public services is even more acute. Our schools face immense pressures caused by the different needs and languages of children from immigrant families, particularly in urban areas. Almost half-a-million primary school pupils do not speak English as a first language. In Tower Hamlets the proportion is 76 per cent, and at the White Hart Lane school in Tottenham, children from 50 countries speak 34 languages.

The failure to manage economic migration properly has put further pressure on transport and housing. The regular complaints about overcrowding on the Underground in London reflect the fact that our capital now has 800,000 more inhabitants than in 1997, with no adequate thought given to infrastructure development to keep pace with growth. One chief constable has publicly complained that immigration has added to policing pressures and increased the requirement for translation services, without his force being provided with the requisite resources to cope.

Then there is the wider social impact of these failures. A report published by the Communities and Local Government Select Committee last July warned that the pressure on resources as a result of immigration "increases the risk of community tensions escalating" and that the pace of change in some areas has resulted in migration becoming "the single greatest public concern in Britain, overtaking concerns on crime and terrorism". In some areas of London, these risks are particularly serious - the report highlighting Barking and Dagenham as places where rapid demographic change has increased community tensions.

So when Mr Woolas says that "on a common-sense level there has to be a limit to the population", it is a candid admission of past failure. But he is also copying the approach set out by David Cameron a year ago, when the Conservative leader called on the Prime Minister to meet the demographic challenges Britain faces with a population policy that takes into account both the advantages and costs of economic migration.

We have been calling for a points-based system for years. The Government is now trying to introduce one. However, we have also made clear that a points-based system is pointless without an overall limit on the numbers of people coming to the UK. Ministers roundly rejected that approach until now, it appears.

If Mr Woolas is serious about putting proper limits on economic migration, then I welcome this volte-face. But to be credible, after more than a decade of uncontrolled immigration, ministers need to be crystal clear about what their policy now is and candid about their past mistakes, not just float ideas in newspaper interviews which they then row back on less then 24 hours later.

A YouGov poll last year found that the public regarded the failure to control immigration as Tony Blair's greatest failure in office. As Chancellor, Gordon Brown was part of that failure but now has an opportunity to make up for it. Yet, as with the economy, public trust once lost is difficult to salvage.

Is the Government that spent 12 years storing up the problems with a failed approach to immigration really capable of sorting the mess out? I doubt it. We need the kind of fundamental change in approach that cannot be delivered through spin but only by a change in government.

A Conservative government will set immigration policy within a wider strategy that meets the changing demographic make-up of Britain, taking full account of its impact on our population and maximising the economic advantages while mitigating the costs and risks. We have pledged an annual limit on economic migration to Britain. We have set out policies to avoid the abuse of our rules by those promoting sham marriages from abroad. We have called for newcomers to be proficient in a basic level of English, because it is vital for cohesive communities. And we have set out detailed proposals for a dedicated Border Police Force, with the remit, powers and capacity to secure our border controls to stem the crime that thrives on porous borders.

Only a Conservative government can credibly deliver the overhaul in approach that will ensure the controlled immigration that Britain needs to prosper in the 21st century. Ministers continue to posture. But they created the problems that are emerging because of their open-door policy, and they are not now capable of fixing them.