Reuters/London

Britain will fail to meet a government target to reduce the number of migrants entering the country to below 100,000 a year, Business Secretary Vince Cable said.

Prime Minister David Cameron promised in the run-up to the 2010 election to cut net migration to the “tens of thousands” by 2015, down from the 200,000 a year expected under current trends.

Cable, a member of the Liberal Democrat party which traditionally holds a pro-immigration stance, said that the target would most likely not be achieved due to a variety of factors the government cannot influence.

“It involves British people emigrating - you can’t control that. It involves free movement within the European Union - in and out. It involves British people coming back from overseas who are not immigrants but are counted in the numbers,” Cable told the BBC.

“Setting an arbitrary cap is not helpful. It almost certainly won’t achieve the below 100,000 level the Conservatives are setting,” he said.

Trailing in the polls ahead of European elections in May and national polls next year, Cameron is striving to stem a right-wing threat from the anti-immigration UK Independence Party.

In December, the government brought forward measures that will force EU migrants to wait three months before they can apply for benefits.

Meanwhile, according to a survey yesterday, over three quarters of Britons want a reduction in immigration.

Immigration has become a key topic heading into a 2015 election.

Seventy-seven percent of people wanted to see a reduction in immigration, the survey on Britain’s social attitudes showed, matching the previous high in the 30-year data series from 2008.

The survey also showed a hardening of sentiment against immigration, with 56%, the highest proportion in the history of the survey, wanting a big fall in the number of people coming to Britain rather than just a small reduction.

The issue has been brought into sharp relief by the lifting of restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian citizens’ right to work in Britain on January 1 - something previous polls showed the public was worried about, and which members of Cameron’s own party tried to prevent.

Polls show Conservative voters are increasingly turning to UKIP because they welcome the party’s plan to end Britain’s European Union membership and drastically cut immigration. UKIP does not have any elected representatives in parliament, but polls show it has around 17% of voters’ support.

Last month, in an effort to stem the loss of voters and shore up support from his party, Cameron rushed in regulations to restrict EU migrants’ access to Britain’s welfare system.

He has also risked a falling out with the European Union by proposing tougher restrictions on migrants from poorer EU states into wealthy ones.

Labour, the main opposition party which currently leads in opinion polls, has criticised the government’s immigration policies as “chaotic”, and wants to clamp down on businesses using cheap, unskilled foreign workers.

Boris for two-year benefit ban on migrants

Boris Johnson weighed into the immigration row yesterday by calling for stronger controls on welfare claimants from the European Union. The mayor urged a full two-year ban on full benefit claims by migrants from new EU member states like Romania and Bulgaria. He also backed David Cameron’s call to renegotiate powers so Britain can stop paying millions in child benefit for children who are living in other countries. Speaking on his LBC 97.3 phone-in, Johnson said that although he backed immigration he still had a “problem” with the free movement of workers within the expanded EU. “For me that’s a real concern because when we joined the Common Market in 1973 and had a referendum in 1975 we were joining a much, much smaller group of nations that were much, much closer in their economic circumstances than the great mass — it’s 500mn people, it’s 27 countries — (where) you’ve got huge divergences in benefits systems and so on.”