New Home Office asylum and visa data suggest that the new government has inherited falling immigration, following newly implemented policy changes on legal migration, the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford said today.
Declining visa grants will make it easier for the new government to meet its commitment to reduce net migration. Home Office data showed a 156,000 (27%) reduction in the total number of visas issued, from 583,000 in January to June 2023 to 427,000 in the same period of 2024. The number of visas issued for work and study in the first half of 2024. In the first half of 2024, 237,000 work visas were granted, compared to 304,000 in calendar year 2023. The fall was mostly driven by health and care visas, which fell by 81,000 or 51% over the same period. Earlier data suggest that this was driven primarily by care workers, following changes in the Home Office to scrutinize employer applications more carefully.
Perhaps surprisingly, the number of Skilled Worker visa applications outside of health and care remained constant between May-July 2023 and 2024, despite much higher salary thresholds introduced in April 2024.
The number of visas granted to students’ family members in the first two quarters of 2024 were down 49,000 or 81% compared to the first two quarters of 2023, following the previous government’s ban on most students’ dependants. While any change in the number of student main applicants themselves will not be clear until after the summer, there were 79,000 visa grants to main applicants in the first two quarters of 2024, a 23% decline compared to the same period a year earlier (102,000). Most of this decline (85%) was accounted for by a fall in visa grants to Indian and Nigerian main applicants.
Dr Ben Brindle, Researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford said: “Visa numbers dropped in the last few months of the Conservative government and emigration has also been rising. In theory, this should mean a decline in net migration over the coming year. But the precise scale of it is hard to predict: we don’t yet know how many of the recent student arrivals will remain in the UK long term, and any bounce-back in health and care visas would also slow the decline. Nonetheless, the strong indication is that Labour will be able to meet its commitment to reduce net migration from the unusually high levels the UK has recently seen, primarily due to trends that were already in train well before they were elected.
“There has been a lot of speculation about the impacts of a decline in student numbers on the university sector in the UK. It’s too early to say how big the decline this year will be, as most students apply for their visas over the summer. The impacts are likely to fall on the non-Russell Group institutions that had previously ramped up overseas recruitment, particularly from India and Nigeria. Some of this decline was probably inevitable for reasons unrelated to policy: including a currency collapse in Nigeria and the end of the post-Covid bounceback”.
While the previous government made good progress on reducing the asylum backlog in 2023, the processing of asylum claims fell in the second quarter of the year. In Q2 2024, the government made substantive decisions on 15,965 applications, down from 24,348 in Q1 2024. This meant that the asylum backlog stopped falling, sitting at 118,882 people at the end of June 2024. The number of caseworkers remained broadly stable at 2,464, implying fewer asylum decisions per worker.
Dr Peter Walsh, Senior Researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said: “Until earlier this year, the government was still working through applications that weren’t affected by the Illegal Migration Act, which meant it was able to progressively reduce the backlog. However, it seems that the new legislation started to bite in the spring, when the Home Office ran out of older cases to process. In theory, the previous government did have some discretion to continue to process claims (as Labour says it is now doing) but it appears to have decided not to use it.”
Daily data on small boat arrivals in 2024 to 20 August (19,300) remain similar to last year’s numbers (18,700). Dr Walsh added: “It is too early to say how small boat arrivals will change under a Labour government. Over the last few years, numbers have not visibly responded to political developments and announcements. If policies have any impact at all, it’s much more likely to be when they are implemented, not when they are announced.”
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