Labour refuses to cap net migration as 350,000 set to become yearly norm | Politics | News




Yearly net migration levels of about 350,000 will become the norm in Britain, experts have warned.

While the number will fall from its current level of 728,000, it is said that it will remain historically high.

Despite the warnings, Cabinet minister Pat McFadden insisted the Government is not going to have a “numerical target for net migration".

It comes after the staggering scale of Britain’s skyrocketing immigration was laid bare in a new graph, which shows those arriving from outside the EU quintupled in just three years.

Numbers surged from about 193,000 in 2019 to 965,000 in 2022, according to official data.

Immigration hotspots of England and Wales have also been revealed in an interactive map. It shows how the effect of migration has left some parts of the country “unrecognisable” from 30 years ago.

Official data last week showed another record-busting year, with Office for National Statistics (ONS) analysts revealing 906,000 people were added to the UK's population during the year ending June 2023.

This was 166,000 – or 22% – higher than the agency's original toll, which itself was an all-time high.

Brian Bell, chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee, said Britain will have to get used to historically high net migration figures.

“I think without any further policy changes, it's likely that it will settle at somewhere around 300,000 to perhaps 350,000 as the long-run figure, so higher than it was over the previous 20 years but much lower of course than it is today," he told Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News.

"We do expect net migration to continue to fall, but towards a level of about 300,000.”

Sir Keir Starmer has sought to blame rising numbers on Brexit. However, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the data highlighted how the Conservative Party failed to grip immigration when it was in power.

Mr McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, told the same programme that Labour is already tackling immigration.

“Fear not, the document that we're going to publish will talk about migration, both legal and illegal,” he said.

“We've set up a new, secure border command, which we said we would at the election. We have got a new returns agreement with Iraq.

“We've increased the number of returns. We've published our Welfare To Work paper.”

He added: “I don't say that we'll give you a target number, but we will certainly talk about migration, both legal and illegal when we publish the document later this week.”

Shadow Environment Secretary Victoria Atkins said: “I think we have acknowledged, as Kemi [Badenoch] in fairness did in her speech this week, that the numbers have been too high.

"There are a number of reasons for that, including, of course, we had the enormous humanitarian response to conflict in Ukraine, in Afghanistan and the worries about human rights coercion in Hong Kong.

“But with those reasons to one side, we also want to look at the fundamentals."

ONS bosses have yet to update their estimates for individual authorities, meaning the true immigration levels could be even greater.

Middlesbrough – home to roughly 150,000 people – was this summer named as being the council most affected by immigration, registering an influx of just shy of 6,800 international migrants throughout 2023.

The ONS's most up-to-date figures, therefore, imply international migration last year alone accounted for roughly 4.4% of Middlesbrough's total population.

Similarly high figures were logged in Coventry (4.3%) and Newham in London (3.9%).

Sky-high immigration levels meant parts of the capital welcomed up to 240 more residents per square kilometre last year, heaping even greater pressure on housing, schools and the struggling NHS.

Birmingham logged the biggest net gain last year in international migrants, becoming home to nearly 25,000 citizens from outside the UK.



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Posted: 2024-12-01 13:12:10

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