Labour has halved UK net migration. The data Reform UK won't quote

[UknownM]

ONS published in November 2025 had UK net migration at 204,000 in the year ending June 2025 — down 78% from the 2023 peak of around 906,000. The fall came under Labour's May 2025 Immigration White Paper: care worker visa route closed to overseas applicants from July 2025, Skilled Worker skills threshold raised to degree level, English language requirements tightened.
The piece walks the numbers + what each policy lever has actually done + the implication for Reform UK's anti-migration campaigning given Labour's already substantially reformed the system. Found this clear: https://trendingsheet.com/article/how-labour-halved-the-boriswave-uk-net-migration-math-reform-uk-2025

Well to be fair making the UK such an unattractive jurisdiction that citizens are leaving and people don’t want to come will have the “up” side of reducing net migration…

That's good

Although closing the routes for care workers is the one route I probably wouldn't have closed!

Did they do anything about reviving the thing where you had to advertise a job in the UK first? You had to prove that you needed an overseas candidate and then Boris Johnson changed it.

Labour should really be publicising this. It's a rare win for them.

My employer sponsored a lot of foreign workers and now those workers have to leave. They are skilled train operators and bus drivers, but because they don’t have a degree they have to go. It’s ridiculous.

Immigration should be controlled, of course, but skilled workers who arrived as apprentices or in trainee schemes shouldn’t be penalised.

There has to be some limitations on skilled workers. My son’s company has someone who is trying to do all their professional exams in a shorter timeframe as I believe there is some requirement of exceptional (not sure or wording). His company doesn’t necessarily need overseas employees though, as there are plenty of british graduates looking to join the profession. I think where there is shortages of skills, definitely protect that, but otherwise I think it’s right that the government are tightening up on requirement to hire employees from overseas. In my son’s colleagues case, he came to the UK to study; and now moving to work category.

Immigration is a hot topic but labour have done a lot to reduce the numbers from under the Conservative government.

As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter what the numbers for net migration are - even if it were nothing, it could still mean that we were losing thousands of our brightest and best and replacing them with the same number of people who might well be a constant drain on public services. Some immigration is good, but not in the numbers we have had to suffer. Tell me what the 200,000 who have entered Britain illegally in small boats are contributing? Last time I checked, there wasn’t a war in France, so I don’t believe their claims to be “asylum seekers” - they’re economic migrants coming for what they can get.

It’s good that the government has reacted to the public outcry at the million a year that it reached. Interesting that they haven’t focussed on it. Doesn’t fit their ethos I guess.
I think Mahmood is doing a great job in very difficult circumstances and hope she gets her plan agreed.
The public care most about the country being mugged by the small boats though and that hasn’t changed much.
Under the previous government there was too pandering to groups who wanted a short term solution and to make money. Quicker and cheaper to import than to train. Not for the country overall though.
If care worker salaries have to rise so be it. Cheaper overall than importing families who need supporting more than they contribute. If universities fail because they built a model around selling residency to people from overseas so be it. Am not anti migration but the public see that the country pays for low skilled mass migration while some people make money from it.

Closing routes for people we need is not necessarily a great idea. I would imagine a lot of well qualified migrants have also decided to move on to better jobs abroad. Do they give the illegal arrival numbers?

I think people are not worried about these figures
The problem is the “people arriving in small boats”
it doesn’t feel as if any progress at all has been made here
it looks as if every time Starmer discusses this issue with France we end up paying more and more arrive

Fair on the dual driver. ONS does break it down — the bulk of the fall is fewer non-EU+ arrivals for work and study (work and study dependant arrivals alone fell from 374,000 to 98,000 year-on-year), with a smaller contribution from rising emigration. So it's not predominantly Brits leaving, it's predominantly fewer people arriving via the routes that were tightened. That said, the emigration line is a separate one worth watching as it moves

You can get the numbers yes. Just a few clicks away for anyone with internet. Here is a one click option for you:

Summary of latest statistics - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Illegals are going to be difficult, because they are illegals. And they tend not to want to be found and counted.

On the Resident Labour Market Test — you're right that it was scrapped as part of the 2021 points-based system reset under Boris's government. The May 2025 Labour White Paper raised salary floors and the Skilled Worker skills threshold to degree level rather than reintroducing the RLMT directly, but the narrowing effect on the qualifying pool is similar.

On care workers, that's the trade-off — closing the route cuts net migration but doesn't solve the underlying social care staffing shortage. Some argue the better lever was raising domestic care worker pay rather than shutting the import route. Both views are defensible.

Agree the political silence is odd. It's a rare win Labour seems reluctant to claim.

That's the blunt edge of the degree threshold — it captures occupations where the actual skill came from on-the-job training rather than a formal qualification. Train operators and bus drivers are exactly the cohort it doesn't accommodate well.

The Migration Advisory Committee can recommend carve-outs for specific shortage occupations, so transport operations qualifying as a shortage role is one route back in. Whether MAC recommends it and whether the Home Office acts on it is the next test. The trade-off is real: a sharp instrument gives fast net-migration reduction but cuts some genuinely skilled workers who don't fit the credential template.

Thank you — and the second observation is the article's headline. The May 2025 White Paper threshold raise does roughly what your son's company is now seeing: where there's no genuine shortage, the system tightens. Where there IS shortage (NHS clinical, specific tech roles, possibly transport operations), the Migration Advisory Committee mechanism is supposed to surface those.
Whether MAC + the Home Office work that mechanism in practice over the next 12 months is the open question. The arithmetic of 100k extra reduction the government has costed assumes the carve-outs stay narrow.

Worth a clarification on the data scope. The 204,000 year-ending-June-2025 figure is net long-term international migration as the ONS defines it, which covers people staying in or leaving the UK for 12 months or more. Small-boats arrivals are tracked separately by the Home Office in a different statistical series and are a much smaller absolute number, mostly counted into the asylum caseload.

Both are real numbers but they're not the same number, and the Labour May 2025 White Paper changes addressed the regular routes via the points-based system, not the irregular ones. The small-boats policy stack is a different conversation with a different set of levers.

Agree the political silence is the curious part. The piece's scope is regular net migration via the work and study routes — the small-boats stack and the regular-migration stack are different problems with different levers, and the public-salience weighting between them isn't symmetric.

On the underlying "pay to import vs invest to train" trade-off — that's the structural question both the care worker pay debate and the apprenticeship-route question turn on. The May 2025 White Paper effectively bets that domestic training capacity will fill the gaps the closed routes leave. Whether it can fill them at speed is the next 12-18 months of data.

On well-qualified people moving elsewhere — that's the brain-drain question. Separate ONS emigration line, the data is lagged by a few quarters but is worth watching as the new policy mix lands.
For irregular small-boats arrivals, the Home Office Migration Statistics quarterly bulletin is the source. Small-boats arrivals peaked around 45,000 in 2022 and have run lower since, though the year-to-date trend in 2026 is up. Absolutely a smaller number than regular net migration in volume terms, but it's politically much more visible because it's the most televised part of the system.

You may be reading that online, but the opposite is true. That's the whole point of the deal with France, to stop the traffickers before they can launch a boat. Of course, pre Brexit France had an obligation to do so and the UK could legally return people, now the uk has to pay for special arrangements.

@Summerhillsquarebut pre Brexit France sent more people to us under the Dublin convention (for family reunification) than we sent to them. The number was never above 50!

(By the way, I voted remain, but I see the Dublin thing on threads all the time and I think it is thoroughly disingenuous and the type of thing that the average Rest of Politics person wants to be true but kind of isn’t in practice as it truly hasn’t ever been done at scale - returns were never just a matter of clicking their fingers and returning people to where they came. The idea that we could return 200k, even 50k back to France a year is fantasy - it’s probably as likely that had we been in the EU, we’d have quotas of migrants that we had to take from countries bearing a far greater burden).

Right on the Dublin Convention as a legal framework pre-Brexit. The detail worth adding is that even when the UK was a Dublin signatory, returns from the UK to other EU member states were modest in absolute terms. The framework existed. The throughput was never at the scale some critics imply. Whether the current UK-France arrangement does better or worse than Dublin in volume terms is one of the empirical questions the next 12-18 months of Home Office quarterly data will answer.
On the article's scope: it's about regular net migration via the work and study routes, not small boats. The two are separate Home Office statistical series with different policy levers.

Fair point on the France-specific numbers. Dublin transfers from the UK to France pre-Brexit ran in the low double digits most years. The broader Dublin picture across all EU member states was larger in aggregate, but the France leg specifically was modest. So "never above 50" tracks for France as a bilateral. Worth flagging that the wider Dublin framework was doing more work than the France-only slice suggests, even if neither was at the scale that would close the small-boats route on its own.

They did advertise it. But if you ever want a clear indicator that the media is biassed against Labour you will realise this sort of news is never pushed hard.

The issue isn't just numbers. The issue is who is leaving and who is arriving? Are the people leaving high earners and contributers and are those arriving a net drain?

Thanks for this @UknownM and to everyone posting, it's quite refreshing to see people debating rationally!

If you want migration to the UK to increase again then the mainstream parties are not going to be good enough, they have started listening to the wailing of the 'disenfranchised' and now we are all going to suffer for it economically. The obvious solution is to vote Green, campaign for the Greens and get out there to make sure people are aware of how Labour are secretly pandering to the far right.