A million is a nice round figure, so consider this: in the year ending in June this year some 1.2 million people came to live in Britain. More than a million of them came from outside Europe. That’s quite a big deal, no, for one year? To employ the usual metric, it is over a third the size of Wales. Over 80 per cent of immigrants to Britain – 86 per cent, to be precise – are from outside the EU, and it has been over 80 per cent every year since 2022.
Net migration, which is the statistic normally used, was 728,000 in the year ending June 2024, but revised data from the ONS shows it hit 906,000 the previous year. That’s nearly a million net, and over 1.3 million overall. Net immigration fell by a fifth this year but it is still running at almost triple the level we saw pre-Brexit. But I’m not sure that the net figure – people coming in minus people leaving – quite does justice to the scale of the change that these enormous figures entail. The overwhelming majority of those entering will be from very different cultures, with the challenges for integration that this – with the best will in the world – means.
Let’s put it another way. In the last four years, 3.5 million people have entered the country to live – that actually is the population of Wales. If you subtract the numbers who have left the UK, it still amounts to 2.5 million. And if you’re wondering why the Government is talking about a housing crisis, why the NHS is buckling, that’s one reason why. Of course some incomers will be doing sterling work in the NHS and the care sector, but these are services that obviously they and their families will need too.
This was the figure the Tories bequeathed to the present government. And so it’s squarely the Conservatives’ responsibility. Step forward Boris Johnson, under whom immigration first reached the present record-breaking levels. He led the Brexit campaign with the stirring motto, Take Back Control. You know, I’m not sure that this is what Taking Back Control looked like for most Brexit supporters in 2016. They thought that immigration numbers would come down after Brexit, not go up; and they didn’t bargain on over a million people a year coming from all over the world. But Boris has moved on, Rishi Sunak took over, and with his sunny global corporate outlook on life, he did not regard huge immigration levels as a big deal if it was what business – notably universities – and the public sector needed.
The long term demographic consequences are obvious
But it is a big deal, and it’s one reason why it’s rather a pity that our leaders are so often no longer around to deal with the consequences of their actions. In Boris Johnson’s compelling memoir, Unleashed, he talks bracingly about stopping the boats, or illegal migration. That is no doubt desirable, but what’s interesting is what he didn’t talk about, which is legal migration, which is by a large distance way more important than people pitching up at Dover. It doesn’t seem so long ago, does it, since the Tories came into government promising to bring down immigration to the tens of thousands. Instead, Boris ushered in the era of migration numbered in the hundreds of thousands, over a million.
The long term demographic consequences are obvious, even given we assume, as the Office for National Statistics does, that net figures will decrease significantly in the next few years. According to the organisation MigrationWatch, “Annual net migration of 600,000 (plus children born to migrants) will lead to a projected growth of 20 million in the [next 25 years]. Nearly all of the population increase will be due to immigration, thus bringing closer the time when the present majority element of the population will become the minority.”
So, even on a conservative estimate, the population is likely to grow by nine million in a generation, 25 years. That’s a big deal, something we should be talking about openly, in a rational fashion.
Obviously, many of the people entering the country are bolstering the NHS and the care sectors and filling jobs for which skilled workers are in short supply. But by no means all.
The present government can quite justifiably observe that this is a Tory problem that they are trying to remedy. And they are, crucially, trying to ensure that employers train people already here to do jobs rather than recruiting from abroad, including nurses and carers. But there isn’t any aspiration from Labour to reduce figures to a specific number over a given period, which is what is needed. Kemi Badenoch, the new Tory leader (and a prime exhibit of the benefits of immigration) who has inherited this record from her predecessors, has apologised for her party losing its grip on immigration. But it’s happened. And the consequences will be profound for the future as well as the present.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
