Labour can’t take credit – or be blamed – for latest migration numbers

“Just the man I want to talk to!”

We are out in Dover with Mike Tapp, the first elected Labour MP here for 20 years.

“When are you going to do something about these boats?” constituent Carol puts down her shopping to ask him.

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It is a cliche that in Dover all people want to talk about is immigration.

That’s not true. The NHS, schools, crime, and bills are on the minds of many of the dozens of people we’ve spoken to today; but immigration does come up, unprompted, an awful lot.

“I’d say it’s in the top two or three things most people want to talk about,” Mike Tapp tells me.

He thinks his pitch on immigration during the election, and the failed Conservative pledge to “Stop the Boats”, was a big part of the reason he won.

Since the July election, however, around 20,000 people have crossed the Channel in small boats. In October, this year’s total surpassed that of the whole of 2023.

Is Dover’s MP confident the government’s plan to dismantle smuggling gangs will impact the numbers by the next election? “Absolutely,” he says.

He may need to be right to survive – people here want quantitative evidence that the government’s plans are working.

On Thursday morning the UK’s net migration statistics will be released, along with Home Office data on small boat crossings. They will grab headlines and give us a sense of the big picture trends.

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Labour can’t be blamed, or take credit for, the figures which will cover the year to June.

Their plan to tackle irregular migration is a long term one and will take time to be born out in the numbers.

What we will see impacting the numbers tomorrow is the inherited policy on legal migration, which makes up the vast majority of the figures.

The expectation is overall net migration will fall.

Professor Brian Bell, chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, says it is “very difficult not to see them going down”.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts net migration will fall from around 685,000 last year to around 300,000 in the next three years.

Sir Keir Starmer, the latest prime minister to pledge to get overall net migration falling, will benefit from a combination of factors.

Tighter immigration rules that came into force earlier this year – for example, a ban on care workers and students bringing dependents to the UK – and the fact fewer people are coming on humanitarian routes from places like Hong Kong and Ukraine, will help.

But those factors won’t solve the problems behind the figures. The care sector is still struggling to recruit and hard-up universities benefit from international student fees.

Care home manager Raj Sehgal tells me the dependents policy, brought in by the Conservatives and kept on by Labour, has had a “devastating impact” on the “quality and calibre” of recruits.

“Unfortunately governments work in figures, they don’t see the human side of what we do,” he says.

The government has announced plans to up-skill British workers, including a new body called Skills England and the Industrial Strategy Council.

Professor Bell says “good progress” has been made, and the employment rights bill could help recruitment in sectors like care, but he adds: “The problem is going to be it is going to cost money. If you want to train more Brits to do engineering jobs you have to pay for them to do that training, you have to fund universities and further education colleges to put on those courses.”

Long gone are the days of Theresa May’s pledge to get net migration to the “tens of thousands”, or Rishi Sunak’s pledge to “Stop the Boats”.

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Labour have learnt to be less specific on all forms of migration.

They may well preside over a significant fall in legal migration.

Success, though, will be judged on whether they can solve the fundamentals beyond the numbers.