Happy immigration stats day, one and all. The Home Office has this morning released a raft of data on visa numbers and asylum claims up until June. While Yvette Cooper might prefer to talk about the policing aspect of her brief, the numbers today show the challenges of migration. The figures released today covers three main aspects: legal arrivals (visas granted), illegal migration (primarily small boats) and asylum applications being granted for those who do arrive here illegally.
The most common nationality on these not-so-small boats is now Vietnamese
Take the number of visas being handed out in the first six months of this year. A mixed pattern emerges here, as the Tory tightening of restrictions began to take effect from December. James Cleverly’s move to stop care workers bringing dependants to the UK saw a 26 per cent fall in health and care visas being issued in the year ending June 2024. The fall between April to June figure is even more pronounced, being 81 per cent lower than the same period in 2023.
But against this, family visa awards were up by 35 per cent year on year in the second quarter of 2024: the only category where visas increased. Visa extensions were also up by 43 per cent for the same period. Given that family visa migrants are much more likely to stay long term than other routes, it is another example of how the historic migration surge of 2022 to 2023 will continue to have lasting impacts as new arrivals start to bring over family members. And of course while the number of total visas granting residences is down 13 per cent on last year, that is still 68 per cent higher than in 2019.
Still, there is little sign that this unduly troubles Labour: after all, they refused to say before the election how many legal arrivals were enough. As Ben Brindle of Oxford’s Migration Observatory points out: ‘the strong indication is that Labour will be able to meet its commitment to reduce net migration from the unusually high levels the UK has recently seen, primarily due to trends that were already in train well before they were elected.’ No wonder James Cleverly, now running for the Tory leadership, is out this morning taking credit for the trend.
More challenging is the changing nature of illegal migration. The Home Office says that the average number of people found on each vessel crossing the Channel rose to more than 50 for the first time in the 12 months before June: a five-fold increase from the average of ten people per boat in 2019. The most common nationality on these not-so-small boats is now Vietnamese: there were 2,248 arrivals in the first six months of this year – a fourfold increase on the same period for 2023. Cooper will have to hope that the returns agreement which the Sunak government signed with their Hanoi counterparts will bear similar fruit to the Albania deal of December 2022.
In the medium term, the challenge is likely to be the asylum backlog. It dropped by almost a third in a year, but started to creep up again this spring. This is due to the Home Office pausing all cases after March 2023 due to the Illegal Migration Act and the now-cancelled Rwanda scheme. It means that 96 per cent of all small boat asylum applications made in the last year remain undecided. But most worryingly for Cooper is the woeful state of small boat arrivals being returned – 89 per cent of whom were Albanian. As the Home Office notes baldly: 'Between 2018 and June 2024, there were 3,788 returns of small boat arrivals, or 3 per cent of all small boat arrivals.'
For now, Labour can point to dropping visa numbers as proof that they are tough on borders. But longer term the Home Office will need to speed up processing and returns agreements to avoid some difficult conversations with Rachel Reeves about the spiralling hotels' bill costing the Treasury £8 million a day.
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