Sky News issues Yvette Cooper 'breaking news' - but Labour gets humiliated

issued a breaking news alert as presenter Trevor Phillips asked Home Secretary about Labour's plans to tackle immigration. In the interview, Cooper confirmed she is planning to scrap visas for overseas care workers and non-graduate jobs. She told Phillips that the government's plans to change visas for foreign care workers and skilled workers will see a 50,000 "reduction of low-skilled worker visas" this year. She also confirmed Labour will not be setting fixed targets for net migration, as previous governments have.

Phillips said to her: "You want to bring the numbers down by, I know you won't give me a number, but at least a quarter of a million, 300,000. This doesn't add up to 300,000."

Cooper replied: "The biggest increase was work and study visas, so what we're saying is these new controls we're going to introduce on skilled worker visa and the care worker visa so we're introducing much stricter rules. If you are doing less than a graduate job then you won't included under the skilled worker visa, unless it's for temporary shortage occupation, then there will be new requirements to work in the UK.

"Those changes, the combination of low skilled visa changes and care worker visas, that is a a reduction of 50,000 low-skilled visas this year alone."

However, just moments after her interview, she was skewered by Sky News guest and Guardian columnist Sonia Sodha, who had a stinging verdict on Labour's plans. She said: "The Home Secretary would like us to think the game changing moment is tomorrow when the proposals drop, and we shall see. She sort of talked about some quite sensible things, but you think 'gosh, why haven't governments been able to fix this over the last 20 or 30 years?'

"We live in a world where Google tracks us where we are at every moment, yet the government can't figure out who has overstayed their visa."

She continued: "Labour have got themselves in a bit of bind about this because it's got this pledge to bring down net migration, but the problem is the other part, the Treasury, where actually they don't want immigration to be brought down too much because it is important for the growth agenda.

"Both in the short term and median term there are real skill sets where we use immigration to prop up public services that are in difficult circumstances like the NHS and social care so you've got the goverment politically wanting to bring it down, but if they do, they will bring growth down, and they know there isn't a lot of growth to go around at the moment."