Shabana Mahmood has admitted that ministers addicted to cheap foreign labour are fuelling the unemployment crisis amongst young people. The Home Secretary says her Cabinet colleagues are always making an “urgent” case to bring workers in from abroad.
Ms Mahmood, in a red-on-red attack, said she is frustrated by her own colleagues’ attitude towards immigration because they always pull the “immigration lever”. She said the attitude has contributed to 981,000 people aged between 16 and 24 not in education, employment or training.
Home Secretary hits out at Cabinet colleagues
Ms Mahmood urged Andy Burnham to instil more “control”, with ministers lobbying her for more immigration “once or twice a week”. She told The Rest is Politics: “I have a conversation like that at least once every week or two.
“It happens all the time. And you know, from their side of the equation, they'd be thinking, ‘we've got to plug a gap really quickly and this is the best way to do it really quickly’.
“To which I would say you've got to be able to do a bit more long-term planning for your workforce in your own country.
“This is how you end up with a million NEETs.”
Concerns over pay and conditions
The Home Secretary said: “We're going to need workers from abroad.
“But there have to be, I think you have to be really clear eyed about what you're trying to achieve there and that you're not just giving either the private or indeed the public sector a free pass on training people here at home and giving them fair pay and conditions.
“One of the things that really bothers me in this debate is sometimes with some of my own colleagues in my own party is that, you know, we're the party of work and workers’ rights, workers’ pay and conditions like these are certainly the reason why I'm in politics.”
She added: “And in a funny way, we're too easy on both the public and the private sector, always pulling the immigration lever to bring workers in without thinking about the fact that we have so many young people, a million needs, but also so many other people who are the working poor in our own country.
“This is the bread and butter of a Labour Party. And you should absolutely seek to bring workers in from abroad when you have a genuine labour shortage that you can't fix any other way.
“But I tell you, I got to tell you, since I've been in the Home Office, the sheer number of requests I get from colleagues across government from other departments, can I have 10 visas over here for welders or something?
“I'm like, you're telling me that we can't find 10 welders, but it's become a lever that is easy to pull.
“And everyone always says, well, it's urgent, and we haven't got the time. And I just think we should be more in control here.”
Immigration figures and backbench fury
Net migration fell to 171,000 in the year to December 2025. But this fell from a record high of 944,000 in 2023.
Ms Mahmood warned some ministers want to hire more workers from abroad. She said: “And the other thing that bothers me about that - be no doubt those foreign workers are being brought in because they're cheaper, and their conditions will be worse, right?
“So the massive numbers of people who've come for care work, for example, we all know this is a sector riven with poor pay and conditions, often very abusive working conditions…it's the job of the Labour Party, the party that literally is about work and workers, to be thinking about those pay and conditions, sort the sector out. And then whether you're an immigrant, who's doing a job there or a British citizen, at least you'll know that your pay and conditions are fair.”
Ms Mahmood is already facing fury from her own backbenchers over her crackdown on settlement rights. Union barons have claimed the crackdown could spark an exodus of foreign care workers. More than 100 Labour MPs have said they are against proposals to make migrants wait at least 10 years to apply for settlement rights. Some 4.2 million migrants moved to the UK between 2021 and 2024.
