David Cameron will come under pressure on Monday to say if the Conservative election manifesto will abandon his flagship target to cut net migration to the tens of thousands after two former cabinet ministers said the target was a mistake and had set up false expectations that weakened government credibility.
Cameron pledged to the cut to net migration in 2010, saying there were no ifs or buts about the promise. However, figures published last week showed annual net migration to the UK had reached 298,000, close to record levels.
In a speech last year, Cameron said the Tory manifesto would contain “new metrics” to measure whether the government was meeting its goal of reducing net overseas immigration, but since then has provided no new details.
In recent months, Theresa May, the home secretary, has described the pledge to cut immigration as nothing more than a comment.
Cameron has not said if he will repeat the broken promise in the Conservative manifesto, even though most commentators have said net migration movements are not in the gift of any government that is a member of the European Union with its provisions on free movement.
The Liberal Democrats have written to the Office for National Statistics to insist none of their publications ever imply the promise on net migration was a joint target of the coalition.
The former Cabinet minister Ken Clarke told the Times: “I am afraid that the net migration target has proved to be a mistake. It has been defended to me as almost returning the figures to those when I was home secretary. This is true, but we weren’t in a globalised economy then to the extent that we are now.
“We will have to drop the target. It would not be possible to achieve it without damaging our economy quite severely.”
Lady Warsi, the former Conservative party chairman, warned that the target risked undermining the Tories’ wider political credibility.
“If you set yourself unrealistic targets, you are setting yourself up to fail and, in the long term, turn the whole thing into a bigger issue by fuelling the perception that the government can’t get a grip.”
The former higher education minister David Willetts described the commitment as undeliverable and said the negotiations with the Liberal Democrats over a joint programme in 2010 should have been used to get Cameron out of a commitment that could never have been delivered.
The criticisms will put pressure on Cameron and May to at least refine the targets. Different targets are set for each skill group as well as for EU and non-EU migrants.
Cameron has accepted he will not impose a quota for migrants from the EU, but has set out a range of measures to deprive EU migrants of access to benefits and tax credits.
