Sunder Katwala: What happens to the politics of immigration when numbers start falling?

Sunder Katwala is a British writer and thinker. He is the director of British Future, a UK-based think tank, and former general secretary of the Fabian Society.

How far will falling numbers affect the politics of immigration?

Nobody in British politics is used to hearing that question asked. After all, it is rising immigration – record visa numbers and the persistent flow of small boats – which dominate the politics of the issue. So asking what might or might not change once net migration falls by half this year is a counter-zeitgeist inquiry.

Falling immigration is already a fact rather than a prediction – though that news has yet to reach many media newsrooms, still less their public audiences.

This partly reflects the time lag in producing that headline statistic. It will be May 2025 before the Office of National Statistics produces a net migration figure for the whole year of 2024. Net inward migration of 728,000 for the twelve months to June 2024 was the outgoing government’s “final score” for net migration, with the ONS calculating that annual inward net migration peaked at an extraordinary 906,000 for 2023.

That there was a significant fall in net migration in the six months after the election is a secret hiding in plain sight. The ONS has already published most of the visa data – with significant falls in social care visas and a decline in international students – so it is mainly the calculation with emigration that remains.

Only 12 per cent of the public expected net migration to fall in the following 12 months, when polled a few weeks after the election. So the Starmer government will undeniably have exceeded public expectations on reducing net migration. That is largely because immigration was so high, before heading down, and because public trust in anything that politicians say on the topic was so low.

The new government inherited both a reversion to the norm after exceptional inflows from Ukraine and Hong Kong, and the impact of visa policy changes made by Home Secretary James Cleverly in December 2023. But there may be limits to how well a Conservative attempt to claim the credit for falling numbers would land – since the formula for halving net migration was to more than triple the numbers first.

The Conservatives still struggle to offer a persuasive explanation of why immigration rose so high.  The four main answers offered are betrayal, incompetence, circumstances and complexity.

Robert Jenrick is the Conservative frontbencher to most loudly endorse a ‘betrayal’ theory. The challenge with saying that the Conservatives deliberately ignored and broke their promises – a key Reform message – is that the logic might be to trust somebody different next time.

Kemi Badenoch seems to choose incompetence as the explanation. “We assumed simply instructing civil servants to lower immigration would be enough,” she wrote. This makes no more sense than instructing civil servants to deliver economic growth and blaming them if it doesn’t happen.

Priti Patel, shadow Foreign Secretary, caused controversy by choosing to highlight the circumstances that led to higher migration, such as world events in Hong Kong and Ukraine, and the rationale for the choices that the government made, on students and NHS and social care visas. But Patel giving a plausible rationale for each individual decision cannot address the trust problem caused by the government promising one thing and doing the opposite.

What Patel’s comments also highlight is that the Conservative governments did not have the internal decision-making processes, nor parliamentary accountability, to assess what its choices added up to, especially when redesigning the post-Brexit system from 2018 onwards. Perhaps this was a deliberate tactic to avoid engaging with the complexity of real-world choices – or to confront the competing interests of the Home Office, Treasury, Health and Education departments – but it is fundamental to the policy and political failure.

Keir Starmer’s Labour government has not decided what it wants to say and do about immigration numbers once they start to come down. Beyond delivering its manifesto pledge of an overall reduction, the government has no public view of what the right level of immigration to Britain should be. Home secretary Yvette Cooper and chancellor Rachel Reeves have long opposed a new migration target. They have no crystal ball of the economic or geopolitical conditions of 2030 – and no control over emigration levels.

The politics of immigration are also driven more by asylum than by overall visa numbers. If there is a visible lack of control over small boats in the Channel and asylum accommodation, significant falls in net migration may have little impact on public perceptions.

Whatever level the current government achieves, the opposition parties will say it should have gone further. Badenoch wants a legal cap on net migration – though she has not yet adopted Robert Jenrick’s proposal that it must be set at 100,000 or lower. Reform leader Farage believes that ‘net zero’ would be a good level for immigration to the UK. Yet, for parties that aspire to govern, this means grappling with the dilemmas of control if the slogans are to be turned into policies.

Disagreement about the pros and cons of different levels and types of immigration will continue as the numbers fall. But there is a growing recognition among the think-tanks and backbench voices on right, centre and left that there is a point of process that ought to be common ground, between serious migration sceptics who want to will the means for a reduction, serious liberals who believe that governments should be able to defend the immigration that is good for Britain, and for the balancers in between who believe in seriously considering the choices and trade-offs of immigration, domestic training and skills, housing demand and integration.

The government’s White Paper should introduce an immigration plan – just as it has a spending review and annual budget for the economy. That could engage with the real-world challenges of control and contribution – of how to pursue reductions sincerely, how to defend the migration that we decide to keep, and how to plan properly and seriously for the population levels, distribution and training needs that those choices deliver.

People may have different views about how trust was lost on immigration – but there ought to be a broad consensus that it now needs to be rebuilt.