Threading the needle: prospects for the imminent immigration white paper

It’s not every day that a publication by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) sparks an impromptu press conference in Downing Street. But last November the ONS released revised figures showing that net migration – the numbers migrating to the UK minus the numbers emigrating – reached over 900,000 in the year to June 2023, more than four times higher than pre-pandemic levels. Speaking in Number 10 on the day the statistics were published, prime minister Keir Starmer announced that a white paper setting out “a plan to reduce immigration” would be published imminently.

Fast forward to May and the white paper is now by all accounts on the cusp of publication. But over that time, the economic picture has changed dramatically. US President Trump’s erratic announcements on swingeing tariffs have ignited global trade tensions, fomenting widespread economic uncertainty. The future growth forecast for the UK looks increasingly precarious and the chancellor has little room for manoeuvre to meet her fiscal rules. The risk is that future reductions in migration further dampen the UK’s growth prospects and undermine the public finances.

The government therefore must carry out a careful balancing act over immigration policy, with different departments pulling in different directions. This is a familiar challenge: prime ministers have often had to navigate disagreements between the Treasury – as well as other departments in favour of liberalising visa rules to further their own priorities – and the Home Office, which is focused on tightening rules up to manage numbers and prevent abuse. 

An annual migration plan

The current situation underlines the need for an annual migration plan, in order to develop a coordinated cross-government approach to managing trade-offs on migration policy. An annual migration plan would be based on a structured process for working through departmental differences and coming to an agreed government position – drawing on the way that government works around other cross-cutting moments such as budgets.

The white paper could provide the starting point for an annual planning process, underpinned by a new ministerial working group. But for this to work, the white paper needs to include a set of explicit objectives for what immigration policy should achieve. While the government has made clear its view that net migration levels should come down, there is not yet a sense of its wider long-term goals.

So what might these objectives look like? There are four areas the government should prioritise. 

First, immigration policy should be directed towards economic growth and improved living standards, reflecting the government’s overarching mission. This should be measured in terms of GDP per head rather than GDP, in order to account for the growth in GDP which occurs as a result of a rising population.

Second, while migration brings wide-ranging economic and social benefits, the government also needs to carefully manage any associated pressures. In particular, this means ensuring that overall migration levels are commensurate with current levels of infrastructure and housing-building, while dealing with local pressures on public services such as schools and GPs. Net migration of over 900,000 is clearly not sustainable based on current levels of housing supply, for example

Third, immigration policy should support people to integrate into communities. In his speech following the summer riots last year, the prime minister spoke of a “societal black hole” exposed by the disorder. This is of course a multi-faceted challenge, but when it comes to immigration policy every lever should be pulled to help heal divides rather than deepen them further. As IPPR has previously argued, promoting settlement – rather than temporary migration – is crucial for successful integration and community cohesion. 

Finally, immigration policy should protect the most vulnerable, including victims of exploitation and modern slavery. This means on the one hand enforcing labour laws effectively, while also ensuring that policy helps to mitigate rather than exacerbate exploitation, insecure status, and wage undercutting through unfair employment practices.

Trends in net migration

If these are some of the government’s objectives, then how might it go about achieving them in practice? The prime minister has said repeatedly he wants to bring down net migration levels. But numbers are already falling: after a peak of 906,000 in the year ending June 2023, net migration was 728,000 in June 2024 and there are expectations of a further fall in the year ending December 2024.

In fact, numbers in some of the key migration categories have fallen sharply since late 2023, largely as a result of the last government’s efforts to tighten visa rules (fig 1). Perhaps most notably, there has been around an 80 per cent decline in main health and care visa applications, most likely driven in large part by greater scrutiny of care worker visa sponsors. 

Net migration is therefore expected to decline regardless of the current government’s actions – most likely by hundreds of thousands.

But if the government wants to reduce net migration further or faster, the white paper will need to take a nuanced approach which balances multiple objectives. The trade-offs and choices (including on economic growth and fiscal space) will become sharper and more challenging if the government seeks to reduce migration by more rather than less. Taking the objectives proposed above as a starting point, five potential options stand out, though none are cost-free.

Policy options for the white paper

First, the government should boost domestic skills investment in priority occupations. Ministers have called on the ‘quad’ – ie the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), Skills England, the Industrial Strategy Council, and DWP – to help coordinate immigration and skills policy. To help with this effort, the government could ask the MAC to identify a list of ‘priority occupations’ which are critical to the UK’s industrial strategy or to public services and where recruitment from abroad is currently necessary for the government’s wider objectives. This would form the basis of a new ‘priority occupation list’ where overseas workers could be sponsored on the Skilled Worker visa at lower salary thresholds. 

Jobs on the list would then be subject to an annual strategic review by the quad, setting out action plans for how to reduce use of visas. This would primarily be through sector deals with businesses to invest in domestic skills – or, where appropriate, to raise wages and working conditions. If annual progress targets were not met, jobs would be removed from the list, in order to incentivise progress.

Second, the government should consider how to close the visa route for social care workers without destabilising the social care system. The MAC has always been sceptical about the long-term value of this route, given the primary reason for shortages in the care sector is poor pay and conditions. Moreover, there has been widespread abuse and exploitation of the route since its introduction. 

But this does not diminish the scale of the workforce crisis in the social care sector. The vacancy rate in 2023/24 in England was 8.3 per cent, compared to a rate of 2.8 per cent for the whole UK labour market in early 2024. Any attempt to end social care visas would therefore need to be implemented gradually with a robust transition plan, including reforms to develop a domestic pipeline of care workers and to improve conditions and pay (building on the government’s proposals for a fair pay agreement for care workers). Coordination on this between the Home Office and the Department of Health and Social Care (and with Treasury) would be a central feature of an annual immigration plan. 

Third, the government should further toughen its approach to tackling exploitation across work visa routes. There has been progress in reducing the scale of abuse by social care sponsors, but the risk is it now transfers into other sectors. The government therefore needs a robust strategy to tackle migrant exploitation. New conditions could be placed on sponsor licenses for sectors at risk of exploitation – for instance, requiring sponsors to provide information about migrants’ rights and entitlements. Employers sponsoring people on the Health and Care visa could be required to adopt the code of practice for international recruitment of health and social care personnel.

Fourth, the graduate route should be reformed to ensure it is used for graduate-level work. Reform of the graduate route is clearly a point of contention between the Home Office and the Department for Education, given that the fees of international students play a critical role in higher education finances. If the graduate route is curtailed or abolished, then the UK could well become less attractive to international students – and so either domestic tuition fees would need to be raised or universities would face further cutbacks (and some might even close). But equally, the graduate route is an obvious target for a government looking to bring down net migration, given it could mean fewer people staying long-term after their studies.  

The compromise might be tightening the route to focus on allowing students to work for any employer at any salary, provided it is a graduate role (with an appropriate ‘grace period’ to allow graduating students to secure a job). This would stay true to the principle of the route and maintain its primary economic benefits. But the government would still need to manage the impacts on universities, which could come with a cost to the Treasury. An annual migration plan would provide a structure for the right discussions to happen across government.

Finally, the government should reinstate a migration impacts fund to support migrant integration and alleviate the potential pressures of migration on communities. The first migration impacts fund was introduced in 2009 under prime minister Gordon Brown, and a similar fund was introduced under the Conservatives in 2016. These funds helped support projects such as community-led English language classes, anti-social behaviour initiatives, and community development activities.

This approach to integration would be more fruitful than efforts to lengthen or inhibit pathways to settlement. Making it harder to settle would likely backfire, trapping people in insecure immigration status if they prove ineligible for permanent residence. The end result would be a larger cohort of people living and working irregularly, undermining their integration and fuelling exploitation, while doing little to bring down migration levels.

The white paper will be a critical turning point for immigration in this parliament. The prime minister’s announcement in November signalled that immigration is a political priority that cannot be ignored. This instinct is correct. But now the government must go further and set out a clear mission statement for how it wants immigration policy to work – one that articulates clear objectives, reconciles competing priorities, and rebuilds public confidence in the system.