Tory MPs have admitted their failures over migrant numbers (Image: Getty)
Pensioners fear going into hospital because they cannot understand their doctors, Tory MPs have warned.
Former health minister Neil O’Brien, speaking alongside former Home Office adviser Nick Timothy, said the Government must be “much more demanding” about the English language skills of those working in the NHS.
Mr O’Brien claimed doctors being unable to communicate with their patients properly is a “bloody dangerous thing”.
And the migration expert admitted this is symptomatic of Britain’s problem of integrating different communities.
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He said, at a Conservative Party fringe event hosted by the Centre for Policy Studies: “We must, must, must do more on the English language. Because that is the no-brainer. It’s the first step in everything to do with integration.
“We are super squeamish about talking about some of the problems this causes, particularly in the NHS.
“I meet constituents all the time – I had a lovely old lady – she said she is genuinely scared about going into hospital because last time she went in she couldn’t make herself understood and she couldn’t understand people in there.
“Likewise a friend of ours, whose son had a near-death experience and the clinician was doing a handover at the end of their time in hospital and he’s a nice guy, she’s a wonderful nurse, and he just had to say ‘I’m so sorry, I just cannot understand what you are saying’.
“She was lovely about it and went and got someone else.
“But operating in a clinical environment, making life and death decisions when people in the team or patients can’t understand [each other] is a bloody dangerous thing to do.
“And in health, we’ve got to be much more demanding about the standards of English. Not basic English. Good English. You’ve got to really understand the nuances of stuff.”
Mr O’Brien stressed Britain needs a “hard cap” on the number of migrants coming to the UK to prevent the housing stock from being further overwhelmed.
He said: “We do have that control now. It is one of the reasons people voted the way they did [for ].
“They wanted to take back control so we could fix immigration policy.
“We took control back but didn’t fix immigration policy.
“Funnily enough, we now have 121 MPs and people are very annoyed about us.
“All of us who have been elected have been through this rather searing experience of speaking to thousands of people who were extremely angry, not just about the boats, but also on our overall failure on immigration.
“It is a failure. We did betray people. We promised again and again to cut numbers then we increased them to a record level.”
Nick Timothy, a former advisor to Theresa May in the Home Office, said: “We can probably agree, that as a party now we are in opposition we will reflect on the last 14 years and this is the biggest broken promise.
“We as a party will unite around the proposition that we need much stronger border controls.
“We need legal migration to be much lower than it has been.”
And on integration, Mr Timothy admitted the Home Office doesn’t “make that easier” by not limiting the number of new arrivals.
He said: “We shouldn’t think about this, only in economic terms. Immigration does change the composition of the country. We are struggling in lots of our cities and towns, with a lack of integration.
“And the country needs space to breathe and space for us to try and get this right where it hasn’t been going right.
“We don’t make that easier by doing more and more with really high rates of immigration.”
Net migration hit 685,000 in 2023, fuelled by sharp increases in foreign workers arriving on health and social care visas.
And Britain has faced a desperate battle to end the Channel small boat crisis.
Some 25,185 migrants have been detected in dinghies so far this year.
Tory leadership candidate slammed his leadership rivals, declaring those offering a simple solution to tackling migration “don’t know what they are talking about”.
Asked about controlling illegal migration, Mr Cleverly told a Conservative fringe event: “Under my watch in the seven months I was, there our asylum rejection rate went up, our deportation rate went up, our net migration came down.
“I gobbed-off less and delivered a bucketload more.
“That is what gets us back into office, and anyone who sits here in front of you or on a stage wherever and says the simple solution is to do this one thing, they either don’t know what they are talking about or they hope you don’t know what you are talking about.”