UK Net Migration Still Near Historic High Despite Tory Curbs
(Bloomberg) -- The number of long-term migrants arriving in the UK slipped in the year to June, but remained historically high despite curbs introduced by the last Conservative government.
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An estimated 728,000 more people moved to the UK than left the country, according to the Office for National Statistics. That’s down from 906,000 a year earlier, a level bigger than the population of most UK cities that was revised up heavily from earlier estimates.
The revisions for the year to June 2023 show just how much migration to the UK soared in the years following Brexit and the pandemic. Previously, the ONS thought that a net 740,000 arrived over that time, and that the all-time high for net migration was 764,000 in the 2022 calendar year.
The figures will pile more pressure on the new government to bring net migration numbers down. Immigration was one of the key battlegrounds in the July general election, with former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s failure to curb the number of arrivals a key factor in the Tories’ defeat to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
“Today’s numbers show that the government inherited a situation from the previous government, where they had effectively run Britain as an experiment in open borders,” Starmer’s spokesman, Dave Pares, told reporters on Thursday.
The Conservatives bled support to the anti-migration Reform UK party in the election, and since then the continued arrival of migrants on small boats across the English Channel has prompted far-right riots and attacks on hotels housing asylum seekers.
In her first major speech as Conservative party leader on Wednesday, Kemi Badenoch said all recent governments — including the one of which she was a part — had presided over migration that was too high. She vowed to set a cap on numbers arriving to the UK, though declined to say what that was or how she would reduce the reliance of the UK economy on migrant workers.
“These are the final scores of the last government, after more than a decade of making promises they could not keep on immigration,” said Sunder Katwala, director of think tank British Future. “Starmer will oversee a continuing fall from the record levels of net migration but his challenge now is to manage the trade-offs on migration for the economy, NHS, universities and social care.”
Declining numbers of dependants arriving on study visas and fewer people arriving for work-related reasons were behind the drop in net migration in the latest year, the ONS said Thursday.
“This is consistent with visa data published by the Home Office, and in part reflects policy changes from earlier this year. It is also driven by a rise in long-term emigration, most notably for those who came to the UK on study-related visas. This is likely a consequence of the large number of students who came to the UK post-pandemic now reaching the end of their courses.”
The ONS attributed its heavy upward revisions to 2022-23 partly to receiving more complete travel data, and to a data error which meant tens of thousands of Ukrainians arriving on humanitarian visas had been missed previously.
Net migration in the latest year was more than double the number who arrived in the 12 months through June 2016, the year before the Brexit referendum. The jump has angered those who voted to leave the European Union in the hope it would bring migration down. While people from EU+ countries — the EU and Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland — are now leaving the UK on balance, the UK has allowed in larger numbers of migrants from other countries to fill gaps in the labor force.
The total number of long-term immigrants who came to the country in the year to June 2024 was 1.2 million, according to the ONS. Around 86% of those were from outside the EU+.
The most common reason those non-EU+ citizens came was to work, as 417,000 people arrived on work-related visas. Another 375,000 came on study-related visas.
Asylum seekers have been a lightning rod for far-right protesters against migration, with the riots over the summer targeting hotels housing these people or businesses and charities providing services to them. But the number of people claiming asylum accounted for just 84,000 of non-EU+ migrants, or 8%, while the remainder arrived for family or humanitarian reasons.
After scrapping the Tories’ controversial Rwanda policy which would have sent some asylum seekers to the African nation, Labour said it was going to focus on reducing the backlog of asylum cases which were waiting to be processed. Despite these efforts, separate data from the Home Office Thursday showed the backlog rising to 97,200 at the end of September.
In its last few months in power, the Tory government imposed bans on most migrant students and care workers bringing dependents with them to the UK. The ONS said Thursday that a large part of the fall in immigration in the year to June 2024 was due to a reduction in the number of dependents arriving on student visas.
Of all the non-EU+ citizens who came to the UK in the year to June 2024, 29% were main applicants on study visas while 8% were their dependents.
However in the work sector, there were still more people arriving as dependents than main applicant, at 23% of non-EU+ nationals compared to 18% respectively. The ONS said that its most recent data points showed falls in the number of people arriving for work-related reasons, implying that Sunak-era curbs on care workers bringing dependents to the UK are now biting.
Separate and more timely data released Thursday from the Home Office helped to flesh this out. It showed the number of main applicants granted Health and Care Visas was down 85% in the third quarter from a year earlier, to 6,600. The Home Office has previously said the reduction in people coming for work is also down to its crackdown on employers who were bringing migrant workers to the UK, especially in the care sector, and then subjecting them to exploitation.
But it wasn’t just the health and care sector which saw a fall in the number of migrant workers. Months before leaving government, the Tories increased the salary thresholds which migrant workers must earn to qualify for a Skilled Worker Visa. That has brought grants of those visas outside health and care down by 32% to 12,100, with the largest fall seen in middle-skilled roles in the food and hospitality sector, such as butchers and chefs.
“We are yet to see the full impact of the visa restrictions in the data, although this initial data from the summer suggest that migration levels will not necessarily fall below pre-Brexit levels once the policy changes have bedded in,” said Ben Brindle, a researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
The ONS figures showed the vast majority of non-EU+ migrants who arrived in the year to June 2024, at 82%, were aged 16-64 while 17% were children and 1% were 65 or older. The gender split was 52% male to 48% female and Indian was the most common nationality for arrivals, as 116,000 arrived on work-related visas and 127,000 on study-related visas, followed by Nigerian, Pakistani, Chinese and Zimbabwean nationals.
--With assistance from Alex Morales and Ellen Milligan.
(Adds quote from prime minister’s spokesman in fifth paragraph)
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