Britain Doesn’t Have An Immigration Problem. It Has An Honesty Problem.

For over a decade, both sides of British politics have promised to reduce immigration. In 2010, David Cameron's Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition aimed to lower net migration from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands a year. Yet between June 2012 and March 2020, before the outbreak of COVID-19, net migration continued to range between 150,000 and 325,000. This isn’t to say that net migration can’t be reduced; after reaching a record high of 944,000 in March 2023, it has since fallen to 171,000. This brings it back within the range seen during the Cameron years, but still far above the tens of thousands once promised. At the same time, Britain has continued to rely on workers from overseas, particularly in the NHS, with social care and other sectors facing labour shortages. The question, therefore, is no longer simply whether net migration can be reduced, but whether the economic and social costs of reducing it further are worth paying.

The recent fall in migration has been driven largely by rule changes around non-EU+ migration, with net migration for EU+ nationals already negative since the year ending June 2022. In 2025, net migration for non-EU+ nationals was 350,000, significantly lower than the 511,000 a year earlier, while the number of non-EU+ nationals migrating for work fell by 47%. At the beginning of 2024, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government put restrictions on postgraduate students and care workers bringing dependants, raised the minimum income requirement for family visas from £18,600 to £29,000, and increased the skilled worker minimum salary from £26,200 to £38,700. Further policies under Keir Starmer’s Labour government, such as ending overseas recruitment for care workers and increasing the Immigration Skills Charge by 32%, have also contributed to the decrease in non-EU+ immigration. These changes have clearly demonstrated that, when the correct policies are put in place, immigration can be brought down. However, one concerning issue still facing Britain after implementing these measures is what happens when the jobs that migrant workers were filling have nobody to take their place.

The clearest example of this scenario would be the social care sector. Sunak’s government responded to restrictions on overseas recruitment with a £75 million investment to improve training, apprenticeships, qualifications and career progression in social care. However, while this approach appears promising, £75 million was evidently not a large enough investment when looking at the scale of the workforce shortage facing the sector. Over £50 million of this funding went into a new qualification for up to 37,000 pre-existing social care workers, while only £20 million went into apprenticeships for, in the government’s own words, “hundreds of new social work and nurse apprentices”. When compared with the 55,000-worker decrease in international recruitment to adult social care from 2023/24 to 2024/25, it is clear that Sunak’s investment was insufficient in replacing the international workforce it was restricting. Over the same period, the number of posts filled by British nationals also fell by 30,000, and Skills for Care estimates that another 470,000 posts could be required by 2040 to keep up with an ageing population. So, while training more British workers is worthwhile for the future of the country, it is also important to consider that the result of this will not be overnight. It is for this reason that restrictions on overseas recruitment need to be lifted, so that while Britain trains its domestic workforce, international workers can provide the immediate care needed to keep services running.

Social care is not the only example of this, the NHS is facing a similar problem but on a far larger scale. Its solution to this is the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan, which aims to expand domestic training, including doubling medical school places to 15,000 a year by 2031/32, and increasing GP and adult nursing training places by 50% and 92% respectively. The long-term goal of these targets is to reduce internationally recruited staff from 24%, when the plan was published, to between 9% and 10.5% by 2036/37. Despite this, the plan also makes a point to acknowledge how overseas recruitment will still need to remain around current levels to meet workforce demands in the short and medium term. This makes the rapid fall in Health and Care Worker visa grants far more worrying. From the year ending 2024 to the year ending 2025, the number of these visas granted was reduced by 51%, with grants to nursing professionals specifically down 73%. The NHS, for this reason, provides the clearest example of the contradiction in British immigration policy: the government wants to reduce reliance on overseas workers, but the workforce it claims to replace them with will not exist for many years to come.

There is no reason why Britain must choose between building a stronger domestic workforce and allowing international workers to meet current shortages. Britain should instead invest more in education and improving working conditions to make essential jobs more attractive to domestic workers. Through the implementation of heavy restrictions on overseas recruitment before the domestic workforce has been properly trained, the government is creating an increasingly larger gap between the workers needed and the workers it actually has.

The British immigration debate will therefore go on, but it cannot be an honest one until politicians are transparent about the consequences of lowering immigration. The public deserves to know the price of reducing immigration, and until that conversation happens, promising lower numbers will remain a convenient way to win public support while the country unknowingly bears the consequences.