Labour’s pledges on migration: the data

by Mihnea Cuibus

 

The Labour 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 – reached record levels after Brexit. The ONS revised its estimates upwards several times, with its latest figures showing a peak of just over 900,000 in the year ending 30 June 2023. A year later, this had declined by 20% (Figure 1). However, net migration remained at historically high levels, and the government has said it wants to bring numbers down.

Figure 1

Net migration was expected to decline from 2024 onwards, regardless of the change in government or any new policies. This is for two reasons. First, more former international students are emigrating following a boom in arrivals between 2021 and 2023, although student emigration is not as high as expected because a higher share started staying in the UK. Second, immigration has declined following the introduction of visa restrictions by the previous government. In the first nine months of 2024, visa grants for long-term work and study fell by 43% and 31%, respectively, compared to the year before.

The government promised to 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 have been 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 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 pledged to improve training and reduce demand for overseas workers by linking policies on immigration and skills. The MAC has been tasked to collaborate with the newly created Skills England and other institutions on new labour market policies. It has also been commissioned to review demand for overseas visas in IT and engineering and asked to proactively monitor sectors where skill shortages led to surges in overseas employment. However, the government’s plans remain at a relatively early stage, and it is not yet clear whether they will affect the number of people coming to the UK. Even if the government succeeds in improving domestic skills, this will not automatically translate into fewer migrants, as the Migration Advisory Committee has pointed out.

Most of the recent growth in work migration came from the health and care industry, especially aftercare workers were added to the shortage occupation list in 2022. The increases prompted the Conservative government to introduce new restrictions in early 2024 – a rise 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. The new government has said it will maintain the restrictions.

The number of skilled worker visas issued fell by 57% in the first 9 months of 2024 compared to the year before. This was mostly driven by a sharp decline in health and care, though other skilled visas also fell significantly in the third quarter. It likely reflects the combined impact of the new restrictions, as well as operational changes in the Home Office to scrutinise sponsorship applications in the care sector more carefully and step up enforcement against employers who break the law.

Official data will tell us whether work visa numbers continue to decline. However, it will be difficult to assess whether domestic skills initiatives are having an impact, or whether any future declines result from the government’s new policies.

Figure 2

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 the number of international students has declined in 2024 after the previous government introduced restrictions on their right to bring family to the UK.

The 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, then fell to 29,000 in 2023. The decline was mostly explained by fewer arrivals from Albania.

Another 33,600 people arrived in the UK by small boat in the first 11 months of 2024, more than last year but around a quarter less than in the same period of 2022. Over the last few years, numbers have fluctuated up and down for many reasons and it is hard to disentangle the causes. The Home Office suggested that a period of unexpectedly calm weather in the Channel played a key role, although it is not clear if weather conditions affect crossings over periods of several months (rather than simply determining their timing in the short run).

Labour and the Conservatives both agree that small boat arrivals should be sharply reduced, but 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 in the UK without authorisation to the East African country.

The Labour government cancelled the Rwanda scheme and promised to reduce crossings by tackling criminal smuggling networks. It established a new Border Security Command to coordinate investigations and committed to increase staffing. Legislation will be introduced to give the BSC expanded “counterterrorism-style” powers, such as the ability to search people and seize their belongings more easily. The government aims to step up cooperation with Europol and other international partners, including by increasing the number of British officers stationed on the continent. Like the previous government, the new government has signed deals with other countries, such as a security agreement with Iraq to tackle transnational smuggling gangs.

The impact of these new policies remains 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 can 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 not allowed to work, and the government, which saw its spending on support and accommodation rise sharply. Several factors explain the large backlog, including more applications and slow decision-making in the Home Office. The previous government responded by streamlining procedures and hiring additional caseworkers, which initially led to a sharp rise in the number of initial decisions.

The backlog stood at around 97,000 applications at the end of September 2024. While the backlog had declined in 2023, it increased again in the third quarter of 2024. In other words, Labour was not able to reduce the backlog in its first three months in office. It says that this is because the previous government stopped conducting asylum interviews following the Illegal Migration Act. Labour has resumed processing applications and says decisions are now picking up. If so, it should become visible in the statistics during 2025.

The 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 were made in a relatively short period in 2023, increasing the total number of refusals. As negative decisions are appealed, they create an additional backlog in the courts – around 34,000 asylum cases were pending before a first-tier tribunal on 30 September 2024, compared to 19,000 a year before.

Pledge 5: Increasing returns

Labour has pledged to remove more people who have no legal status in the UK. Total returns fell sharply between 2010 and 2020. Increases in recent years have partially reversed this decline – in the year ending 30 September 2024, returns increased by almost a third compared to the year before. However, numbers remained relatively low in historical terms. Total and enforced returns were 27% and 45% lower than a decade before, respectively.

It is not clear why returns declined in the 2010s. 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, fewer people being refused visas in-country, 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 would create a specialised enforcement unit with more than 1,000 staff, maintain Conservative plans to increase detention spaces, set up support programmes in 11 countries to support the reintegration of returnees and negotiate new return deals with countries of origin. The latter will build on several new agreements concluded by the previous government in recent years. However, 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. 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.

Returns do seem to be increasing. Considering both enforced removals and voluntary departures, around 29,000 people were returned in 2024 by 7 December – about a quarter more than the year before and the highest number since 2017. However, it is difficult to know how much of this increase results from Labour’s activities in office and how much is just a continuation of the existing trend we saw under the previous government.

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 removals.

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.