THE Government’s plans for more devolution across England is essential to boost the country’s economic growth, according to Treasury Minister James Murray.

He also said that net migration is too high and that immigration needs to be focussed more on the skills that are needed in the workforce.

Murray told GB News: “We want to increase the level of devolution across England, because we feel that’s really important to driving economic growth in every part of the country.

“What the Deputy Prime Minister is going to be doing today is writing to those council leaders in areas which are not currently covered by a devolution deal, inviting them to come back to her by September with what powers and responsibilities they would like to see devolved to them to help them drive economic growth.

“Because we know that putting those powers in the hands of local leaders is a really important way of driving economic growth. And if we can get economic growth up across the country, which is one of our central missions as a government, that’s the way to make people better off.”

He added: “There’s a lot of international evidence to show that when you have a devolution of powers increases productivity in local areas, and in fact we’ve seen that in the UK.

“Having local leaders who know their local areas better than people in Whitehall who understand what the needs of people living in the area are, they can make sure they’re targeting the use of resources most effectively, whether that comes to skills investment, transport, planning, and so on.”

Asked about the new government’s approach to immigration, he said: “What’s very clear for us as a government is that we believe net migration is too high. We want to see that come down.

“We’ve got to work already on making that happen. And one of the crucial things that we want to be doing is making sure that the immigration system is working much more closely with the skills system in this country, because at the moment if you have skills shortages in individual sectors, we tend to rely on labour from overseas to fill those gaps.

“That should send a message to the skill system in this country that we need to invest in skills in that sector to make sure people in the UK have skills to do those jobs. That’s the reform that we want to make and we’ve got to work on it straight away.”