Eight months ago, Robert Jenrick and Neil O’Brien were serving ministers under Rishi Sunak. But both are now out of government and keen to show where their former colleagues are going wrong. The two backbenchers today published a big paper on migration with the Centre for Policy Studies. It calls for the Home Office to be broken up to create a new ‘Department of Border Security and Immigration Control’.

The aim is to get the number of legal arrivals to Britain down to the ‘tens of thousands’ – a target which has eluded every Tory leader since David Cameron. Speaking at the report’s launch in Westminster, both Jenrick and O’Brien were keen to stress their emphasis on policy, rather than party politics. Yet with net migration currently at 672,000, few issues are of greater concern to Tory MPs: rightly or wrongly, politics is at the heart of this debate.

The CPS report sets out 36 recommendations which range from eye-catching initiatives like abolishing the graduate visa route to drier proposals such as a ‘Whitehall-wide examination of data recording and transparency.’ O’Brien made a convincing case that – whichever side you are on in this debate – there is a need to enlighten the migration debate by placing more information in the public realm. But with seven months remaining in this parliament, how many of the measures championed by Jenrick and O’Brien can really be enacted into law?

Ideas like the Home Office’s abolition are clearly longer-term strategies for a future government to enact. But the two Tories are convinced that half their recommendations can be implemented by the next election. They see plans for a ‘migration Budget’ – under which MPs would divide in the House to vote on each individual visa route – as a useful way of forcing Labour to come clean on their own migration plans. Automatic liberalisation could be prevented by indexing salary thresholds for visa routes in line with inflation. Any move by a future government to reverse such a measures once enacted would potentially provoke an outcry, just as the Tories have struggled repeatedly to take Gordon Brown’s top rate of tax from 50p back down to 40p.

The pair have received a warm reaction to their proposals from across the Tory party. Damian Green, the chair of the One Nation Group, said it ‘would be great’ to see the 100,000 commitment return and urged the government ‘to stamp out abuses of the visa system.’ Rupert Harrison, George Osborne’s former aide and a Tory candidate in Bicester, hailed the ‘very careful and sensible analysis on immigration.’ That perhaps ought to give those within government pause for thought before they reject Jenrick and O’Brien’s paper as being simply about post-election positioning.

The next quarterly Home Office immigration statistics are due to be released in a fortnight’s time. Adopting some of these proposals ahead of that date could help ministers alleviate Tory MPs’ fears that they are not taking their concerns about migration seriously enough.