Restoring Control over the Immigration System
By UK Home Office
1. Immigration is important for Britain. For centuries people have come to this country to build a better life, contributing economically and culturally to our society and helping to rebuild our country after major shocks such as the Second World War. From Uganda to Ukraine, Britain has also proudly played its part in offering refuge – and in many cases, a fresh start – to those fleeing violence and persecution overseas. 2. It is precisely because of immigration’s historic significance to our country, that it must be properly controlled and managed, so that the public can have confidence in the system, so that it properly benefits the UK and so that the system itself is fair. Delivering such an immigration system, coupled with strong border security, is one of the foundations of this Government’s Plan for Change. 3. Over recent years, proper control and management of the immigration system has been lost. While much attention has rightly been focused on the surge in illegal migration across the Channel, reaching a peak of 45,744 small boat arrivals in 2022, there has been less focus on the rapid increase in the levels of legal net migration since 2019. Levels of net migration were approximately 200,000 per year throughout most of the 2010s and have risen from 224,000 in the year to June 2019 to a record high of 906,000 in the year ending June 2023- a four-fold increase in the space of under four years. 1 4. At the same time as a significant expansion in overall levels of migration, driven by particularly by non-EU nationals and their dependants coming to the UK for work and study, the mix of visa holders also changed – shifting increasingly away from higher-skilled migration, and towards lower-skilled migration. 5. Those unsustainably high levels of migration have also added extra demand to our public services and our housing supply during a decade when both are already stretched, adding to pressure on key services and the housing market, and fragmenting social relations. High levels of migration can also result in widespread labour exploitation, as migrant workers’ rights are violated, and employers who play by the rules are undercut. 6. It is this Government’s intention to restore confidence in the immigration system, so that we can support and see benefits from migration whilst ensuring it is properly controlled and is not used as an alternative to fixing problems here in the UK. That is what this White Paper seeks to achieve. THE CASE FOR CHANGE 7. Net migration hit a record high of +906,000 in June 2023 and quadrupled from its level of 224,000 in June 2019. In the latest data, for the year ending June 2024, net migration was +728,000. While levels of net migration have come down slightly in the latest year, it remains significantly above the level of net migration at any period in recent history, having averaged between 200,000 to 300,000 per year from 2010 to 2019.2 8. Recent high levels of net migration have been driven by non-EU nationals and their dependants coming to the UK for work, study, and humanitarian reasons. This includes temporary factors such as humanitarian migration from Ukraine and Hong Kong. Recent policy changes have reduced the number of migrants particularly on the health and care and study routes. 9. The recent significant increases followed the introduction of new immigration policies in 2020, following the UK's departure from the EU – a system which made a number of key changes as part of the transition to a single EU/non-EU set of rules, including reducing the overall skills threshold for migration from degree-level (Regulated Qualifications Framework Level 6 or RQF 6) to A-Level-equivalent (RQF 3), and setting a new basic salary threshold for all countries at £25,600.
London: UK Government, 2025. 82p. Annex; 15p.