Home secretary denies that proposal is xenophobic, adding that plan is just one of several under consideration

The home secretary, Amber Rudd, has defended proposals to require companies to publish the number of international staff they employ.

The proposal has been criticised by several high-profile business leaders, including the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC). Rudd, who has set out a consultation paper on how to encourage businesses to hire British staff, denied the lists were intended as a “badge of shame”.

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“We should be able to have a conversation about immigration, we should be able to have a conversation about what skills we want to have in the UK and whether we need to go out of the UK in order to get them to boost our economy and I don’t think we should have a situation where we can’t talk about it,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Rudd denied the request was xenophobic, saying she had been careful in her conference speech on Tuesday “not to fall into that trap”.

British businesses had a “responsibility to local employment and we’re asking them to join us on this journey so they don’t automatically go abroad,” she said.

The scheme was one of several under consideration and “not something we’re definitely going to do”, Rudd admitted.



“We talk sometimes about low levels of unemployment, but still one in 10 18- to 24-year-olds are unemployed and I want business to look first at locally training people where possible,” she said.

Adam Marshall, acting director general of the BCC, said he thought companies would be “concerned if having a global workforce was seen as a badge of shame”.

He said: “Companies do so much to train up workers and look for local hires, I don’t think they should be penalised for [recruiting abroad] when they have specific skills needs.”

Carolyn Fairbairn, the director-general of the CBI, warned that the proposals risked sending the wrong message to companies already nervous about the risks of Brexit.

She said: “This idea that it is going to be a shameful thing to have people from overseas working in our companies, I think is absolutely the wrong thing: we’re not that kind of country.



“We have been a magnet for talent for many years; we should be proud of our ability to attract the best, and this approach that appears to be around shaming companies for doing that is one that our members are very, very concerned about.”

She added: “we have a real concern that the measures that Amber Rudd put out yesterday for consultation will be damaging for business, just at a time when we are trying to be confident about our ability to attract investment and to attract talented people to our country”.

Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said the proposal was a “a nasty little policy that deserves to be thrown out on the rubbish heap”.

“This threatens to further stoke the resentment that has seen increases in hate crime across our country,” he said, adding that his party would “stand proud in our belief that immigration benefits our culture, our economy and our communities”.

“Where these benefits aren’t felt, it is a failure of governments, local and national, not the migrants,” Farron said.

Migration was the key theme of Rudd’s conference speech on Wednesday as she announced sweeping new restrictions on overseas students, including two-tier visa rules depending on the quality of university or institution, as well as a £140m “controlling migration fund”.

Plans to cut the numbers of international students were attacked by Universities UK and the Universities and Colleges Union, who said students were net contributors to the UK.

Rudd said politicians needed to be able to talk about the subject sensibly. “Sometimes a politician gets up and talks about British values and what we think that means and we can be knocked down quite harshly, but I don’t think we should be,” she told BBC Radio 5 Live.

“I think we should be able to talk about British values and about immigration without people saying: ‘Oh, you’re just being like a crazed other party.’”