Labour’s pledges on migration: the data

by Mihnea Cuibus

 

The new government has made a series of pledges on migration: to bring down net migration, reduce reliance on overseas workers, tackle smuggling gangs, clear the asylum backlog, and accelerate the removal of people without legal status in the UK.

Progress on several of the pledges can be tracked using readily available official data. However, the data do not always tell us everything we might want to know. Some promises cannot be assessed at all using publicly available data. This commentary explains what the data do and do not tell us about the Labour government’s progress towards its goals as it begins implementing its plans.

Pledge 1: Bringing down net migration

Net migration – the number of people immigrating to the UK minus the number leaving the country – has been at the forefront of immigration debates in the UK for much of the past decade. Numbers reached a record level in 2022 when migration added 764,000 people to the UK’s population. Net migration fell slightly in 2023 but remained at 685,000, an unusually high level. The new government has said it will bring down net migration.

Figure 1

Net migration is expected to decline from 2024 onwards regardless of any new policies or the change in government. This is for two reasons: first, more former international students are emigrating following a boom in arrivals between 2021 and 2023; second, the visa restrictions introduced by the previous government will likely reduce immigration in 2024 – early data show that visa applications for work and study declined significantly in the first seven months of the year.

The government says it will maintain most of the restrictions introduced by the Conservatives in the first half of 2024. That includes the ban on partners and children of care workers and most overseas students, increasing the general skilled worker salary threshold to £38,700, and abolishing the 20% going rate discount for migrants working in shortage occupations. Planned increases to the £29,000 threshold for family migrants will be frozen pending a review by the MAC, however.

In one sense, it will be easy to track whether the Labour government is fulfilling its promises to lower net migration: official data will reveal if net migration falls by a significant amount in the coming months and years. However, it is important to note that declining numbers will not necessarily result from the current government’s policies. In addition, the numbers alone do not tell us much about the impacts of net migration, which depend in large part on who is migrating, not just how many.

Pledge 2: Reducing reliance on overseas workers

In opposition, Labour said that the number of work visas issued was too high and that UK employers should reduce their reliance on overseas workers. The government says it will improve training and reduce demand for overseas workers by linking policies on immigration, skills, and the labour market. These plans remain at an early stage, and it is not yet clear whether they will affect the number of people coming to the UK.

In work migration, most of the growth in 2022 and 2023 came from the health and care industry, especially aftercare workers were added to the shortage occupation list in 2022. This sharp growth prompted the previous government to introduce new restrictions in early 2024, including an increase in the minimum income threshold for a skilled work visa in the private sector, a ban on care workers bringing their partners and children to the UK, and increased scrutiny of employers applying to sponsor care workers’ visas. Labour says it will maintain these restrictions.

In the first half of 2024, the number of skilled worker visas issued fell by 49% compared to the year before, driven by a sharp decline in the health and care sector. This likely reflects operational changes in the Home Office to scrutinize sponsorship applications in the care sector more carefully, and potentially also the impact of the restrictions introduced in the first half of the year. Official data will tell us whether the issuance of work visas continues to decline, although it will be difficult to assess whether domestic skills initiatives are having an impact, or whether any future declines result from the new government’s policies.

Another route for overseas workers into the UK labour market is the Graduate Visa, which allows international students to work in the country for two or three years following their graduation. This became more significant as the number of international students rose sharply, and more of them chose to stay after their studies. The government has pledged to maintain the Graduate route, though early visa data show the number of international students is likely to decline in 2024 after the previous government introduced restrictions on their right to bring family to the UK.

Figure 2

The new government has also said it will reduce the exploitation of migrants on work visas, including by removing sponsor licenses from employers who violate employment law. There is evidence that the exploitation of migrants on work visas has been widespread, although it is inherently difficult to quantify its scale or track changes over time.

Pledge 3: Reducing small boat arrivals by cracking down on smuggling networks

Small boat arrivals make up around 3-4% of overall immigration. The number of people crossing the Channel peaked at around 46,000 in 2022. It fell by around a third in 2023, largely due to fewer arrivals from Albania.

Another 21,000 people arrived in the UK by small boat in the first 8 months of 2024 – slightly more than in the same period of 2023 but less than in 2022. Most arrivals happen over the warmer summer months, though it remains highly uncertain how numbers will evolve over the rest of 2024.

Though Labour and the Conservatives agree that small boat arrivals should be sharply reduced, there are major differences between their approaches. The previous government’s flagship policy on small boats was the Rwanda scheme, which aimed to relocate people who arrived irregularly in the UK to the East African country.

Labour cancelled the Rwanda scheme and said it wants to focus on reducing crossings by tackling criminal smuggling networks and implementing returns agreements for refused asylum seekers and other irregular migrants. A Border Security Command will be established and given ‘counterterrorism-style’ powers, including the ability to search people, seize their belongings, and restrict access to the internet and banking before securing a conviction. It will also be tasked with improving cooperation with Europol and other forces across the continent.

The impacts of Labour’s policy remain to be seen. While we have official data on how small boat crossings change, it will be very difficult to attribute any increase or decrease to government policy. Many external factors influence arrivals more than government policy. These include the weather, social and economic developments in countries of origin, and developments in smuggling networks.

Figure 3

Pledge 4: Clearing the asylum backlog

Another concern for the Labour government is the UK’s backlog of asylum applications. The backlog comes at a cost to both asylum seekers, who face uncertainty and are unable to work, and the government, which saw its spending on support and accommodation rise sharply. The backlog reached a record level of around 134,000 applications on 30 June 2023 – up from 6,000 at the end of 2010. It then fell to around 86,000 applications by 30 June 2024.

Several factors explain the large backlog, including rising applications and slower decision-making in the Home Office. In response, the previous government streamlined decision-making and hired two thousand additional asylum caseworkers. The number of initial decisions rose sharply as a result, and the backlog started declining in the second half of 2023.

The backlog stagnated in the second quarter of 2024 as decision-making slowed down. Many applications remaining in the backlog could not be decided because a provision in the Illegal Migration Act prevented people who arrived in the UK without permission after 7 March 2023 from being granted protection. Yvette Cooper, the new Home Secretary, announced the end of this provision in July 2024, enabling all asylum applications in the backlog to be processed.

The new government has not offered a timeline for its goal of ‘clearing the backlog’, nor a definition of what it means to have cleared it. There will always be at least some pending decisions because of new applications entering the system.

Figure 4

Initial decisions are not the only point in the asylum system where delays take place. A large number of initial decisions have been made in a relatively short period. As negative decisions are appealed, this has created an additional backlog in the courts – around 27,000 asylum cases were pending before a first-tier tribunal on 31 March 2024, compared to 7,500 a year before.

Pledge 5: Increasing returns

Labour has pledged to remove more people who have no legal status in the UK. The number of overall returns fell by 82% between 2010 and 2020 and has only partly recovered since. Enforced removals were particularly affected by the decline.

It is not clear why returns fell. Changes in policy and the resources available for enforcement are unlikely to fully explain the decline. Other factors may have played a role, such as changes in the composition of the unauthorised population, legal challenges, or declining cooperation with authorities in origin countries. However, there is a lack of evidence on the precise drivers of the change.

To increase returns, the government said it will create a specialised enforcement unit with more than 1,000 staff, increase detention spaces by around 15%,  set up support programmes in 11 countries to support the reintegration of returnees and negotiate new returns agreements with countries of origin. The previous government concluded several new returns agreements, although the UK conducts close to zero enforced returns to many of the top countries of origin for people crossing the channel in small boats (e.g. if when they are refused asylum), such as Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Labour previously suggested a returns deal with the EU that would cover non-EU citizens who have sought asylum, though it remains unclear whether an agreement can be reached, as well as how many people it would cover and how swiftly they would be returned.

In time, official data will reveal whether the government is achieving its overall goal of increasing returns. The government has set a short-term target of achieving the highest rate of returns since 2018 in the last six months of 2024. At the time of writing, they had not specified whether this applied to voluntary returns, enforced removals, or both. Total and voluntary returns were already higher in 2023 than in 2018. If the target refers to enforced returns only, this implies removing around 5,000 people between July and December, 44% more than in the same period of last year. While realistic, the target is still a relatively low bar in historical terms – in 2018, enforced returns were at their lowest level in more than a decade.

Figure 5

The number of returns alone does not tell us everything about how effective government policy is at removing people with no legal status. For example, some types of returns are more cost-effective than others. In particular, voluntary returns are both cheaper and considered more humane than enforced returns.

Returns do not result only from government policy: UK voluntary returns statistics include people who leave with no contact with the authorities (e.g. a person who overstays their visa by a couple of months and then leaves the country of their own accord would be counted as a return). These independent returns made up an average of 38% of all enforced and voluntary returns from 2018 to 2023.

Finally, it is difficult to know what a ‘high’ or ‘low’ number of removals is. The size of the unauthorised population is not known, and there are official statistics on only one sub-group: refused asylum seekers. As a result, we do not know what share of people without legal status are removed, go on to receive legal residence rights, or remain in the UK without status.

Thanks to David Goodhart for comments on an earlier draft. All errors remain our own.