Labour 'was wrong' to reject fear of immigration

In a party political broadcast, Mr Miliband said: “People can lose out if migration isn’t properly managed. The pace of change can be too fast or people can see their wages undercut. So it’s not prejudiced when people worry about immigration; it’s understandable. And we were wrong in the past when we dismissed people’s concerns.”

The issue has dominated the political agenda following last week’s Eastleigh by-election, where the UK Independence Party came second partly on the back of local concerns about the immigration that has taken place since 2004 and fears that numbers could rise once Bulgarians and Romanians get freedom from January.

Seeking to deliver a message to key Labour communities, Mr Miliband said low-skilled immigration is too high and must be brought down, if necessary by blocking immigrants from new EU member states such as Croatia.

“It means let’s give proper training to workers already here so that they have a fighting chance of filling the vacancies that exist.

“There’s nothing wrong in employing people from abroad, but the rules need to be fair so that local people get a fair crack of the whip.”

However, he was careful not to promise Labour could do anything about Bulgaria and Romania, since the transition arrangements which have barred them from living elsewhere in the EU run out at the end of the year.

Recruitment agencies “can’t engage in bad practices like saying ‘we’re only going to employ people from abroad’,” Mr Miliband said. “That’s wrong and we would change it,” he declared.

Speak English

“I’ll make some simple changes . . . We’ll make English language teaching a priority, and the priority it deserves to be. And we’d also have a very simple rule, which says that if you work in the public sector, in a job face to face with the public, you need to be able to speak English,” he went on.

Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan-Smith criticised the European Commission for a legal challenge to the UK habitual residence test, which demands that people live in the UK before they can claim benefits.