Net migration is unlikely to drop below pre-Brexit levels by the end of the decade, remaining at around 250,000 to 350,000 a year, according to an expert forecast.
The war in Ukraine and people arriving to the UK from Hong Kong under resettlement schemes are said to have contributed to the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimate, which put net migration at 606,000 people last year.
However, the figures prompted unease among some Cabinet ministers and Tory MPs, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calling the figure “too high” earlier this year.
The latest forecast, based on certain assumptions about migration trends as well as ONS and Home Office data, suggests that current high levels of immigration over the last two years may lead to higher emigration between 2023 and 2025.
Work Visas
Professor of economics at LSE Alan Manning, who co-authored the new report, said: “Nobody can predict exactly what will happen to net migration, but we can set out some realistic scenarios. “And most plausible scenarios involve net migration falling in the coming years.
“But many different factors affect the outlook, including what share of international students switch to long-term work visas, whether work visa numbers continue to increase as sharply as they have done in the past few years, and what happens to asylum applications.
“The unpredictability means it’s very hard for policymakers to guarantee that they will deliver a specific level of net migration.”
The study finds that, largely due to a significant increase in work visas, predictions of lower net migration levels following Brexit are unlikely to happen.
Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory, said that health and care visas were helping to keep the figures high.
“One of the striking findings is that if current trends continue, work visas look set to be the largest factor shaping overall net migration by some distance. Work-related migration has mostly been driven by health and care,” she said.
“So future migration patterns will be particularly sensitive to developments in that sector.’
Worker Outflow
The prediction comes just after a care workforce body said overseas workers are holding the sector together.Data from a report released by Skills for Care last week shows an estimated 70,000 people took up care jobs in the country after arriving in the UK in 12 months.
The figures, up to March 2023, have risen from 20,000 the previous year following the loosening of visa criteria for care worker roles.
Their arrival helped lower the vacancy rate in the adult social care sector to 9.9 percent, from a peak of 10.6 percent the previous year—though it remains higher than before the pandemic, and much higher than the average of 3.4 percent for the UK economy as a whole.
But the surge in international recruitment has only just been enough to offset a continued outflow of British and EU nationals from the sector, the State of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce in England report said.
In 2022/2023 alone, 159,000 skill-related work visas were granted to foreign nationals outside Europe—an increase from 27,000 permits issued in 2018/2019, according to analysis of government data.
Between 2021 and 2023, nearly 60 percent of those were granted to workers considered to be in low-skilled jobs, including chefs, fishmongers, and poultry workers.
The statistics were described as a “betrayal” of the Tory party’s 2019 manifesto pledge of bringing net migration down by focusing on bringing highly-skilled workers to the UK.
