When Rishi Sunak made ‘stopping the boats’ one of his five priorities after entering No. 10, he ensured that immigration (legal and illegal) would become one of the big issues heading into an election. It seemed, for a while, that the government thought the emphasis on migration would work in its favour. It hasn’t exactly turned out that way.

The migration crackdown announced by James Cleverly at the end of last year is designed to reduce the headline number of net migrants to the UK, after it was reported that in 2022 that net migration reached a record high of 745,000. The policy instruments announced by the Home Secretary to reduce migration are so blunt, they are likely to achieve the government’s desired outcomes, if not by creating a lot of havoc and unintended consequences along the way.

But the government has more than a year’s worth of data to be released before those new rules kick in (from April this year), the next bulk of which has been released this morning. And while we’ll need to wait until spring to get the next update on overall net-migration (last calculated at 672,000 in the year to June 2023), there is already strong indication that the government is in for another year of big numbers.

According to the latest data from the Home Office, visas issued for study, work and family routes reached 1.29 million last year, up 19 per cent from the year before. Looking at the work route, just over 337,240 visas were approved in 2023, a rise of 26 per cent from 2022. Once again, we’re seeing a surge of health and care workers coming to the UK, doubling in 2023 to 146,477 in total, which ‘care workers and home carers’ presenting more than half of those approved. That has also led to an 80 per cent surge in the number of dependents of those workers coming to the UK – 279,131 in total – of which 73 per cent have come over with those on the ‘health and care’ worker route’.

These numbers wouldn’t be so difficult for the government to justify, given how desperate the UK is for people to fill in the mass vacancies in the health and care sector; but ministers have decided instead to make these numbers their problem, by insisting net-migration (on their watch) is far too high and must be reduced. Cleverly’s reforms are specifically designed to reduce dependents coming to the UK with health and care workers – but these changes will not be seen in the data until the next parliament.

What about the government’s most direct pledge, to ‘stop the boats’? In line with the daily tracking of small boat crossings, it seems arrivals are down from 2022 by 36 per cent. They have by no means stopped, with almost 30,000 people arriving in 2023, 80 per cent of the total number of ‘irregular arrivals’ to the UK. These numbers will raise questions about how seriously the government’s Rwanda policy is acting as a deterrent, with tens of thousands of people still ready to make the trip (though ministers insist the test will be when flights start taking off).

The record for asylum claims is also a mixed picture: there is evidence that the government is finally processing applications at a faster rate, with the number of people in ‘receipt of asylum support’ down 10 per cent between September 2023 and December 2023, and the number of people in hotel accommodation down 18 per cent, to 45,768.  But overall 62,336 applicants were granted refugee status, ‘the highest number of people granted since records began (in 1984), due to the combination of a high grant rate and high volumes of decisions being made.’

Breaking down these numbers and explaining them (especially in the UK, where Britons have been so welcoming to those fleeing persecution) continues to paint a far more nuanced picture than the headline rate. But the government’s own efforts to turn migration into a basic talking point of the numbers being ‘too high’ also puts ministers in the tricky position of having to repeatedly explain record-breaking figures.