In the first of his new monthly memos, Paul Richards looks at the challenges incoming Labour ministers would face in 2015

Congratulations on your appointment as immigration minister. You inherit not so much a poisoned chalice as an entire lake of toxicity. You will also be dealing with an issue which speaks to the very heart of public concerns. You will know from your own constituency how salient immigration is on the doorstep. Three-quarters of the public want immigration reduced. That is one reason the United Kingdom Independence party won seats in the general election.

Your first step is to decide what kind of immigration minister to be. You can try to sound tough, and appeal to the base instincts of the great British public. Or you can make the liberal case for immigration’s economic and cultural benefits, and sound out of touch. Your first speech, to the CBI on Wednesday, should strike a balance between the two: firm but fair. The government must welcome the free flow of labour within the European Union. We must honour our commitments to the United Nations and our own instinctive support for refugees and asylum seekers. But we must also ensure secure borders.

On your watch, tens of thousands of Romanians will continue to arrive. When the Poles came under your predecessors we were wholly unprepared. The new prime minister, Ed Miliband, told the BBC in 2011: ‘We got it wrong in a number of respects … We clearly underestimated the number of people coming in from Poland and that had more of an effect therefore than we would otherwise have thought.

You must press the prime minister for a new cabinet committee to handle the influx, taking in our own department, the departments of communities and local government, health, education, work and pensions, foreign office, cabinet office and ministry of justice. You should press the chancellor for a new contingency fund for allocations to schools and the NHS where sudden growth of population puts pressure on services. Last time, Labour councillors kept on telling Labour ministers the figures were out of date and services stretched to bursting. Let’s meet Ion Jinga, the Romanian ambassador to Britain, to review how Romanians are settling in. You could even take some lessons in Romanian.

You need some early wins. Here are some ideas:

We need to do more to celebrate the making of new British citizens. The last Labour government introduced citizenship ceremonies. We need to go further. Let’s create a new licence for public buildings to hold citizenship ceremonies. Let’s revamp the absurd citizenship test, which most of the settled population would have trouble passing, and include more questions about contemporary British life. We should also include questions about British culture and behaviour, from queuing to ordering a drink in a pub.

You could abolish Theresa May’s policy of charging students for using the NHS. The evidence suggests this is putting the brightest and best postgraduates off coming to UK universities. You could announce it as Britain being ‘open for business’ for the world’s best brains.

Another policy quick win might be around the teaching of English. Every government says immigrants should learn English, as the gateway to the jobs market and integration into our society. But the last government cut English language lessons. You should announce a new initiative: a national academy of English tutors, drawn from the ranks of unemployed graduates, to ensure that every immigrant has decent English.

You have inherited a broken system. How about a rapid external review of the border force? You could ask Lord Blunkett to head it up. It should take no more than six months and make recommendations for reform. A word of warning, though: border force staff are sick and tired of reorganisations. You will need to win them round first – perhaps an early visit to Heathrow?

Most of all, you need to crack down hard on people-trafficking. We will get an early meeting with the home secretary, justice minister and No 10 to discuss the Queen’s speech, which must contain a bill to tackle people-smugglers and criminal gangs with new penalties and new powers for the police. This government should be the one which drives these people out of business.

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Paul Richards is a Progress columnist; read his columns here. He tweets @LabourPaul

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