How Boris Johnson’s historic ‘experiment’ is to blame for spike in immigration numbers

Commenting on Thursday’s migration figures, Keir Starmer said Brexit had been used ‘to turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders’, writes John Rentoul

The name of this feature is “Politics Explained”, but there are some subjects that are so hard to explain that we could rename it, just for one day, to “How Did That Happen?”

How was it possible, given that the British people overwhelmingly want less immigration, and voted to leave the European Union partly for that reason, that the British government responded to having the freedom to set its own immigration policy, granted by Brexit, by relaxing controls so that net immigration tripled?

The figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Thursday estimated net immigration in the year to June 2024 – the last year for which the Conservative government was responsible – to be 728,000.

Isn’t that higher than the previous figure?

Yes, the last figure published by the ONS was 685,000 for the year to December 2023 (these estimates are made every six months, so the annual figure is updated by half a year each time). Everyone was expecting the figure to fall, because, very late in the day, the Conservative government changed the rules to restrict immigration.

And immigration did fall, but it turns out that it had been running at a higher level than the ONS realised, so that 685,000 figure has now been revised up to 866,000. And the figure for the year to June 2023, to which the latest figure should be compared, has been revised from the previous estimate of 740,000 up to 906,000.

So net immigration has actually fallen by 20 per cent, comparing the last full year with the year before that. And yet it is still running at a higher level than we thought it was six months ago, though it turns out that figure was wrong.

How high is 700,000 a year anyway?

It may be lower than 900,000, but it is still unprecedented. In the years before the EU referendum, net immigration was running at 300,000 a year, and most people thought that this was much too high. David Cameron, the prime minister at the time, had never actually renounced the policy of reducing it to “tens of thousands”, which was widely interpreted as an aspiration to get it below 100,000 a year.

Ed Miliband got it in the neck from liberal party activists for allowing a Labour mug to be produced with “Controls on Immigration” printed on it, even though he refused to put any numbers on Labour’s policy.

So the answer is that 700,000 is more than twice as high as the level before the referendum, when opinion polls showed that even Remainers wanted less immigration.

How did it happen?

The answer is Boris Johnson, mostly. He promised in his 2019 manifesto to “get Brexit done, and then introduce a firmer and fairer Australian-style points-based immigration system”, and said: “Overall numbers will come down.” But he was never very interested in either the subject of immigration or the policy detail, and had been liberal on immigration as London mayor.

His points system allowed much higher immigration from outside the EU than before, although the effects of coronavirus lockdowns obscured the start of the rise when the transitional period of leaving the EU ended at the end of 2021. Additional numbers of migrants came from Hong Kong and Ukraine, but most of the increase came from those who arrived via work and study routes.

What will happen now?

The Office for Budget Responsibility was forecasting that net immigration would average about 350,000 a year during this parliament, but that is likely to be revised upwards in light of the latest ONS changes.

Kemi Badenoch tried to disown the Tories’ recent past by holding a news conference at short notice on Wednesday, to try to put her gloss on the figures – namely that the previous government “did not deliver” what the people wanted when they voted to end EU free movement.

Keir Starmer tried to take advantage of the Tories’ embarrassment by holding a news conference of his own on Thursday to accuse the previous government of using Brexit as an “experiment” in “open borders”.

He said: “I want to see immigration come down significantly,” knowing that the numbers are indeed likely to come down significantly, mainly because of policy changes made by the previous government in its dying months.

But he also knows that people are worried about the more visible irregular immigration via small boats across the Channel – hence his announcement of a returns deal with Iraq.