His reading of surveys suggests that despite (or perhaps because of) migration hitting record highs, more Britons than ever before view migration as being both economically and culturally beneficial. What’s more, concern about immigration is overwhelmingly concentrated among Conservative voters.
The picture that emerges from all this is of a massive quandary for Sunak. Not dealing with high immigration could well punish the Conservatives among its own voters; but cracking down may not help them gain the new ones they need. Added to that, fulfilling the party’s pledge to reduce immigration would likely result in hits to the two issues – the economy and health – that voters consider more important. It’s quite the pickle.
Solving the immigration growth trap
How might a politician seek to extract themselves from such an invidious position? The short answer is: with difficulty (especially in time for the next general election).
The longer answer is that immigration has become the political equivalent of gaffer tape being used by an incompetent handyman to bodge so many “temporary” fixes that it’s now the only thing holding the house up. If you want to rip off the tape, you first need to address the host of structural issues with the economy and public services that no one has had the time, money, inclination or imagination to address properly. There’s certainly no silver bullet.
Given that the largest cohort of immigrants each year are students, this would appear to be the most obvious place to start. Indeed, the UK Government has already done that. From this January, overseas students will no longer be able to bring family with them unless they are on courses designated as research programmes. A loophole that allowed immigrants to swap a student for a work visa before completing their studies has also been closed.
However, a larger reduction in foreign students will almost certainly have to be accompanied by a new approach to university funding. Higher education institutions primarily rely on tuition fees but the cap on these has not been raised since 2017, resulting in a big real terms cut when inflation is taken into consideration.
English universities now supplement the cost of educating each UK undergraduate student by an average of £2,500, according to the Russell Group. This shortfall will increase to an average of £5,000 per student per year by the end of the decade. To bridge the gap, universities are admitting more overseas students who they can charge as much as they like (or can get away with).
International students now account for roughly a fifth of universities’ income, double the proportion of a decade ago. Earlier this year, Vivienne Stern, the chief executive of Universities UK, told a Lords committee that fees paid by international students “should be the cherry on the cake” of funding for higher education. Instead, they’re “more like the flour”.
At the same time, the Government will also have to find money to train more doctors and nurses. Around 14pc of all UK residents were born abroad. However, 34pc of doctors, 28pc of nurses and 19pc of all NHS staff are immigrants.
Earlier this year, the NHS announced a long-term workforce plan that will result in the number of places in medical schools rising from 7,500 to 15,000 by 2031. The number of training places for nurses will also expand by a third to 40,000 by 2028. However, training doctors is expensive. That’s why universities last year rejected 10,000 medical school applicants despite them achieving the necessary grades. Increasing the number of medical training places available to British students by just 1,500 a year would cost an estimated £427m. Perhaps that is why, last year, foreign citizens made up 46pc of all doctors joining the NHS in England in 2022, a total of 12,148.
Reversing the benefits boom
Addressing labour shortages in the wider economy would likely require a similar Sisyphean effort. But politicians at least know where to look. The number of people of working age who are deemed “economically inactive” has ballooned in recent years. Official unemployment rates may have fallen this week to lows not seen since the 1970s, but numbers of those not working and not looking for work – often because they are caring, or sick – have spiked. In some of the nation’s biggest cities, such as Birmingham and Liverpool, a quarter of all working-age adults are out of a job and not trying to find one.
Reverse this trend, provide retraining and encourage more people to rejoin the workforce, and the economy would be less reliant on foreign-born skilled workers. New arrivals are settling in the UK at the rate of 3,000 a day while those applying for sickness benefits recently hit 4,000 a day.
Part of the solution would be reducing waiting times and boosting the capacity of the NHS to address chronic ailments, which is in part blamed for the out-of-work trend. Yet three quarters of the long-term sick are not waiting for treatment. Indeed the greatest rise is among the under-35s, many of whom complain of bad nerves, not a dodgy hip. At £300bn, the welfare bill easily outstrips the NHS budget, with the bill for incapacity benefit projected to hit almost £30bn in under five years – double what it was just a decade ago.
Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, also recently announced reforms designed to help those with health conditions who want to work being “given the right support and opportunities to move off benefits and towards the jobs market”. However, he told the Commons that one-in-five people deemed too sick to work want to have a job, suggesting much more drastic and politically-difficult measures may be needed to curb the UK’s rampant welfare system: more rigorous Work Capability Assessments, perhaps, then stopping subsidised travel, discounted broadband and phone schemes, and even, ultimately, Universal Credit itself for those who refuse work placements.
There is another home-grown remedy. With the natural population of the UK likely to reach its peak in the next year or two and start declining in the latter part of the decade, the main hope of boosting growth in the absence of an influx of foreign workers would be to encourage higher birth rates (tax incentives, cheaper childcare and, above all, more affordable housing) and boost productivity.
That will be much easier said than done. Economists have created sores on their scalps from all the head scratching they’ve done trying to solve the UK’s “productivity puzzle”. Most agree that an increase in business investment is key. Tax breaks and other incentives would help.
But many companies privately admit they have been sitting on their hands and waiting for a period of political calm after the turmoil of recent years. A brief cessation in politicians promising one thing while delivering the exact opposite might be useful.
