Downing Street on Monday refused to say when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak would meet a Tory pledge to cut net migration, as high inflows of foreign workers, health staff and students drive numbers towards a record high.
Suella Braverman, home secretary, insisted at a conference in London that the government must honour its 2019 manifesto pledge, but that goal now looks highly unlikely as ministers pursue other objectives.
Jeremy Hunt, chancellor, and Gillian Keegan, education secretary, have resisted calls for curbs on student numbers, while health secretary Steve Barclay has backed efforts to recruit more foreign NHS and care staff.
With Britain also opening its doors to refugees from Ukraine, Afghanistan and those fleeing the civil rights crackdown in Hong Kong, some experts believe that data will show that net migration in 2022 topped 700,000.
When the Tories made their manifesto pledge on migration that “overall numbers will come down”, the Office for National Statistics data for the year to June 2019 showed net migration at an estimated 212,000.
Downing Street on Monday said “we recognise the need to reduce overall numbers” but refused to say when this might happen or even what baseline ministers were using.
Braverman, speaking at the rightwing National Conservatism conference in London, said she backed Brexit because she wanted to control migration, adding: “We need to get overall immigration numbers down.”
She added: “It’s 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 high-skilled immigration and more NHS workers, and Sunak has tried to focus attention on tackling irregular migration in small boats rather than legal migration.
Sunak has preferred to talk about “stopping the boats” rather than the much larger number of migrants arriving in the UK legally. “Illegal migration will be the priority,” Downing Street said.
The prime minister will on Tuesday attend a Council of Europe summit in Iceland to call for a co-ordinated effort to tackle “the scourge of illegal migration”.
Ministers are close to agreeing one move to cut legal migration: stopping family members travelling to Britain with international students pursuing a one-year masters course.
But Keegan and Hunt have resisted other Home Office options for curbing student numbers or limiting the right of graduates to stay in the UK for two years, according to officials briefed on the discussions.
The Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, said in March that a larger population, because of increased net migration, “adds 0.5 per cent to potential output in 2027”.
While figures of up to 1mn for last year’s net migration have been mooted in the media, analysts say net inflows of about 700,000 look more plausible, based on the figures the Home Office has already published for grants of visas in the second half of 2022.
These pointed to a sustained increase in the numbers arriving to study and those on skilled worker visas. “Work has really taken off,” said Alan Manning, former head of the government’s Migration Advisory Committee.
He thought it likely that net migration would ease over the next few years, as some recent arrivals returned home, but would remain at relatively high levels as employers in the care sector made use of new freedoms to hire overseas.
The Home Office issued almost 77,000 visas for health and care workers in 2022 — outstripping visa grants for all other skilled workers put together — after adding care workers and home carers to the list of shortage occupations for which visa rules are easier.
Employers in sectors such as hospitality and logistics are now lobbying hard for greater freedom to recruit overseas as the government reviews this shortage occupation list.
“Employers want more than jingoism from government when it comes to growing the economy,” Neil Carberry, chief executive of the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, said in response to Braverman’s comments, arguing that the scale of labour shortages meant that Britain required “openness of migration for work”, which would carry “no risk of any undercutting” of UK workers.
Jonathan Portes, professor at King’s College London, accused ministers of hypocrisy for telling businesses to invest in the UK workforce, while increasingly relying on overseas recruitment in the sectors where it controls wages and working conditions.
However, the economic case for expanding work-related migration, especially in low-paid sectors that are failing to make jobs attractive to UK workers, is not clear cut.
Higher net migration would boost the size of the UK workforce and raise gross domestic product, helping the public finances at the margin.
But while it could ease shortages in particular sectors, it would not solve an overall shortfall of workers in the UK labour force because migration itself leads to the creation of jobs.
Economists say evidence from the past 20 years suggests that migrants have not hurt the job prospects of UK workers or had any big effect on their wages, but equally they have not delivered any significant boost to UK productivity or per capita GDP.