Name: UK net migration down 80% from its peak in 2023 | BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-11-27T16:58:24.000Z
Duration: 4 min 36 s
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Past simple

New figures show that net migration to the uk, that's the difference between the number of people arriving then leaving the country, dropped sharply to 204,000 in the year to June.

That's a significant drop from almost 650,000 in the year to June 2024 and a drop of nearly 80% from the peak in 2023.

Well, with me now is the BBC's head of statistics, Robert Cuff.

Robert, good to have you with us to take us through all of these figures.

Fewer people are coming to the UK to work and to study from outside the eu and they're not bringing as many of their family with them.

It's been a roller coaster ride in the migration numbers over the last two years.

They were running at about 240,000 people, adding about that many people to the population of the UK every year.

Before the pandemic and then after the government opened up programs to bring in people to work in health and social care and gave universities a target to bring in about 600,000 students, we saw this rapid rise up to nearly a million people in about two years.

And since then it's come back down roughly to pre pandemic levels again.

So we are seeing that kind of right due to the changes in the number of people coming and then the changes in the policy that happened to make it harder for them to come.

The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmoud, said a little earlier that net migration had fallen by more than two thirds under this government, which of course has only been in power for, well, a little over a year, not that long.

It's happened while they're in power, but

it reflects decisions that were taken before they came to power, both the rise and the fall, because as I said, it was Boris Johnson's government that made, that made it easier for some people to come to the UK to work or to study.

But they also, under Rishi Sunak, announced measures to make it harder for people to bring their families with them when they came to study or, or when they came to work in, under the health and care visas to work in the nhs.

And so those falls, they started before Labour came to power and they've continued on while Labour on power.

Of course, Shibana Mahmood's predecessor, Yvette Cooper, announced some reforms to the migration system.

So they are going to make further changes, but

it's probably too early to see the effects of those changes.

In the figures now, numbers going in the opposite direction are those on asylum.

The number of people claiming asylum is up, the number of people being housed in hotels is up.

Well, these are probably slightly more worrying numbers for the Home Secretary, because We've seen about 111,000 people claim asylum in the UK in the last year.

Up again on June, up again on the figure before Labour came to power.

And the number of people who are being put up in hotels while awaiting their asylum claims, that's at 36,000.

That's wobbled around a little bit in the last year.

So it's hard to kind of tell just from the latest rise.

You really need to look under the figures at what's driving the demand for hotel accommodation to get a sense of whether they're going to meet their pledge to end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers by the end of Parliament.

And the story there is it's kind of mixed because there are fewer people waiting for decisions.

That's down by about a third since Labour came to power.

They're processing people faster, they're making more decisions more quickly.

But you can't empty the bath if the taps are flowing in faster than they've ever flown.

And if you're seeing a record number of people claiming asylum, well, then it's very hard to end that demand.

That means you have to put people up in hotels.

And then coming back to the drop in migration, Robert, is that decrease sustainable over the longer term?

Because just as there is with asylum on net migration, there is a huge amount of political pressure, not just for this government, but

The falls that we've seen, there's nothing suggesting in the figures that those are going to suddenly bounce back, that we're going to go back up to a level of a million people coming in a year.

Say more people are needed with the right skills.

So, yes, because people were coming to work in and people were coming to study.

And so these will cause discussions for people working in universities who are depending on those fees or employers.

But whether they go down any further, whether these falls will continue, is a much harder one to call because we're at the level that migration was at pretty steadily before the pandemic.

So that's not the tens of thousands that David Cameron spoke about in 2010, it's the hundreds of thousands that they were for about 10 years.

Hard to believe right now that we're going to see Mega Falls from that point.

Okay, Robert, thank you very much, Robert Cuff, for taking us through those pictures there.