Why PM has failed to break UK addiction to immigration

A major skills shortage and millions ‘inactive’ means Sunak is relying on foreign workers. By Tim Wallace

Arecord number of foreign-born workers are employed in the UK, in the latest sign that Rishi Sunak’s efforts to break Britain’s addiction to migrant labour are not working.

A total of 6.9m people born overseas were working in the UK at the end of last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

That is up by more than 400,000 over the past year alone and extends a long trend of high migration.

The number of overseas workers employed in Britain has risen by three-quarters since 2010, despite government promises to get net migration down to tens of thousands a year.

The Conservative Party promised to reduce net migration in its 2019 manifesto, and a pledge to “stop the boats” illegally crossing the Channel is a key part of the Prime Minister’s election campaign.

The latest figures show net longterm migration stood at 672,000 in the 12 months to June last year, down from 2022’s high of 745,000 but, nonetheless, far above anything the Government wanted. It compares with 184,000 when the Tories made their 2019 manifesto promise.

Events have conspired against Sunak. Large numbers of arrivals from Ukraine and Hong Kong have boosted net migration, most likely temporarily, while the pandemic delayed a wave of students coming to study in Britain. They have now come all at once, inflating the numbers.

But there are deeper-seated problems that suggest the Prime Minister will struggle to break the country’s addiction to foreign labour – even as these temporary factors subside.

The Government is effectively “filling large numbers of vacancies in the care sector by importing huge numbers of people,” says Rob McNeil, deputy director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.

This is hard to avoid. Even with migration, there are still 167,000 vacancies in human health and social work, according to the ONS. The number of job openings has not fallen below 100,000 at any point since 2014. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Britons do not want to do these jobs.

“The Government is not prepared to stump up money to pay for people to do these jobs,” says McNeil. “Indeed, increasing wages in the care sector might well create an environment where you have more British people willing to do those jobs.

“The challenge that you have got is that you are probably going to have to increase those wages by quite a lot in order to make a role that has not traditionally been seen as massively attractive more attractive, and who pays for that?”

The care sector is the tip of the iceberg: companies across the economy are advertising more than 900,000 vacancies, yet are struggling to find anyone to do the jobs without bringing in staff from overseas. Adding to the challenges of weaning Britain off immigration is the sheer scale of worklessness. There are 9.3m people of working age who are economically “inactive” – neither in work nor looking for work. It is forcing companies to look abroad to get the workers they need to grow.

Baroness McGregor-Smith, former chief executive of outsourcer Mitie and author of a new report for the British Chambers of Commerce, says the skills required for many new and growing industries simply do not yet exist in the UK. She gives nuclear power, now back in vogue because of net zero, as just one example.

“If you think about other countries that have been building nuclear for many many years, from a skills perspective they have individuals all the way through their supply chains that have built a number of nuclear reactors,” she says.

By contrast, Britain is reliant on France’s EDF to build Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C.

“There is a skills shortage,” Lady McGregor-Smith says. “If we need the skills, we should be able to bring them in while we are growing our own [local skills]. That should be an important principle to help grow the economy. And at the moment we don’t have that.”

The British Chambers of Commerce is pushing for more, not less, migration. It wants visa costs to be reduced and migration rules made more flexible, particularly to enable smaller companies to hire foreign workers until the domestic workforce can be trained up.

Similarly the Confederation of British Industry has called for the Government to give more resources to the Home Office to speed up the processing of visa applications to get workers in faster.

Currently, the Government is moving in the opposite direction, raising the salary threshold at which most migrants can gain a visa from £26,200 to £38,700 from April.

However, McNeil suspects the move will make little difference – professionals are often paid more than £40,000, he says – while care workers are exempt from the cap.

Migration will stay high as long as the demand from businesses for foreign workers remains.

Efforts to train local workers have long been promised, but have yet to produce meaningful results.

“The bottom line with all of this is that symbolic policies – where you make a big, bold promise to achieve some arbitrary number – tend to be more rhetorical than realistic,” adds McNeil. “An honest debate around migration would involve the Government saying they only have limited control.”

The Migration Observatory’s projections indicate that, after current temporary factors subside, an extra 350,000 migrants will come to the UK each year over the long term. That is similar to the level pre-Brexit, when the Government was widely deemed to have lost control.

‘The Government is filling vacancies in the care sector by importing huge numbers of people’