Soaring immigration under fire after 'no ifs, no buts' pledge

Despite a 'no ifs, no buts' promise from David Cameron to cut net migration to the tens of thousands, the figure is 10,000 higher than June 2005, the last record for immigration, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister.

It is the fifth consecutive quarterly rise in the index - raising new questions about the Tories' aim to bring the number below 100,000.

The increase was driven by a record 269,000 EU citizens arriving in Britain.

John Spellar, Labour MP for Warley, said: "When will the Prime Minister face up to that fact that his Home Secretary, 'Teflon' Theresa May, and her Home Office team are utterly hopeless?"

And he said illegal immigration was not being adequately tackled either.

"People are telling them all the time about cases where someone should not be in the country.

"They seem just to not want to know."

A pilot scheme running across the Black Country requires landlords to carry out immigration checks before letting a property.

But Mr Spellar said: "Instead of dealing with immigration, the government is going for gimmicks."

And David Winnick, Labour MP for Walsall North, added: "The government has lost credibility.

"They've made promises they simply cannot keep."

Councillor Pete Lowe, leader of Dudley Council, said: "High immigration puts pressure on local authority services, including the ones we are legally obliged to provide.

"But the issue is not immigration as a whole. The NHS would not have survived so many years without the dedication of migrant doctors, nurses and other staff. What the government is not addressing is the need to control immigration in a way that attracts the right labour to Britain, to supplement and assist our economy."

South Staffordshire Conservative MP Gavin Williamson said the figures were 'disappointing' but laid the blame at the door of the Liberal Democrats, with whom the party spent five years in coalition.

He said: "Many of the measures we wanted to put forward were held back because of the Lib Dems.

"That's not the case any longer now we have a Conservative majority.

"We need to address the reasons why migrants are coming to Britain, why they do not want to stay in other countries and that includes our benefits system which is appealing for some people."

The data, published by the Office for National Statistics, showed immigration - the number of people coming into the country - was 636,000, a rise of 15 per cent compared to the year ending March last year and the highest total since current records started a decade ago.

The number of EU migrants arriving jumped by 56,000.

Immigration of people from outside the EU was up by 23,000 to 284,000, but experts said this was not statistically significant.

The number Romanians and Bulgarians arriving in the UK has almost doubled to 53,000. Restrictions on people from the two countries working in the UK were lifted in January last year.