Downing Street on Monday declined to say when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will deliver on the Tories’ pledge to cut net migration, as high influxes of foreign workers, health care staff and students push numbers to a record high.
Suella Braverman, Home Secretary, insisted during a conference in London that the government must deliver on its 2019 manifesto pledge, but that goal now looks highly unlikely as ministers pursue other goals.
Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor, and Gillian Keegan, Education Secretary, have resisted calls for student numbers to be cut, while Health Secretary Steve Barclay backed efforts to recruit more foreign staff from the NHS and care.
With Britain also opening its doors to refugees from Ukraine, Afghanistan and those fleeing a civil rights crackdown in Hong Kong, some experts say data will show net migration in 2022 surpassed 700,000.
When the Conservatives made their manifesto pledge migration that “overall numbers will fall”, Office for National Statistics data for the year to June 2019 showed an estimated net migration of 212,000.
Downing Street said on Monday “we recognize the need to reduce overall figures”, but declined to say when that might happen or even what rank-and-file ministers were using.
Braverman, speaking at the right-wing National Conservatism conference in London, said she supported Brexit because she wanted to control migration, adding: “We need to reduce the overall number of immigration.”
She added: “It is not xenophobic to say that mass and rapid migration is unsustainable in terms of housing supply, public services and community relations.”
However, Braverman accepted the need for highly skilled immigration and more NHS workers, and Sunak tried to draw attention to the fight against irregular migration in small boats rather than legal migration.
Sunak preferred to speak of “stopping the boats” rather than the much larger number of migrants arriving legally in the UK. “Illegal migration will be the priority,” Downing Street said.
The Prime Minister will take part in a Council of Europe summit in Iceland on Tuesday to call for a coordinated effort to combat “the scourge of illegal immigration”.
Ministers are set to agree a move to curtail legal migration: to prevent family members from traveling to Britain with international students pursuing a one-year masters course.
But Keegan and Hunt have resisted other Home Office options to limit student numbers or limit graduates’ right to stay in the UK for two years, according to officials briefed on the talks.
The Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, said in March that a larger population, due to increased net migration, “adds 0.5% to potential output in 2027.”
While figures of up to 1 million for last year’s net migration have been mooted in the media, analysts say net inflows of around 700,000 seem more plausible, based on figures the ministry of the Interior has already published for the granting of visas in the second half of 2022.
These indicated a sustained increase in the number of students arriving to study and those on skilled worker visas. “The work has really taken off,” said Alan Manning, former head of the government’s Migration Advisory Committee.
He thinks it is likely that net migration will ease over the next few years as some recent arrivals return home, but remain at relatively high levels as care sector employers use new freedoms to hire at home. ‘foreign.
The Home Office issued nearly 77,000 visas for health and care workers in 2022 – surpassing visa grants for all other skilled workers combined – after adding social workers and home care workers to the list of shortage professions for which the visa rules are easier.
Employers in sectors such as hospitality and logistics are now pushing for greater freedom to recruit overseas as the government reviews this list of shortage occupations.
“Employers want more than jingoism from the government when it comes to growing the economy,” said Neil Carberry, chief executive of the Confederation of Recruitment and Employment, in response to comments from Braverman, saying the scale of labor shortages meant Britain demanded “open labor migration”, which would carry “no risk of undercutting” British workers.
Jonathan Portes, a professor at King’s College London, has accused ministers of hypocrisy for telling businesses to invest in the UK workforce, while increasingly relying on overseas recruitment in sectors where it controls wages and working conditions.
However, the economic case for expanding work-related migration, particularly in low-wage sectors that fail to make jobs attractive to UK workers, is unclear.
Higher net migration would increase the size of the UK workforce and increase gross domestic product, helping public finances at the margin.
But while this might alleviate shortages in particular sectors, it would not solve an overall shortage of workers in the UK workforce, as migration itself leads to job creation.
Economists say evidence of the last 20 years suggests that migrants have not harmed the employment prospects of British workers or had a significant effect on their wages, but they have also not brought a significant increase in productivity or GDP per capita in the UK.
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