How much did UK immigration increase in the first full year of the Starmer government? Not to get it all BuzzFeed around 2010, but the answer may surprise you. It’s actually a trick question: according to the latest statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), published on 21 May, net migration was 171,000 for the year ending December 2025, down from 331,000 in 2024 – a drop of almost half.
According to the Immigration Attitudes Tracker published by think tank British Future, almost half (49 per cent) of people wrongly believe that immigration has increased since 2024, with just 16 per cent thinking it has fallen. When broken down by party, 62 per cent of people who think they support Reform believe immigration has been increasing (compared to 41 per cent of those who favor Labour) and 67 per cent expect it to increase next year.
Of course, it is not just general immigration that politicians and the public are concerned about. But Home Office figures released alongside ONS data reveal other downward trends. In the year ending March 2026, there were 12 percent fewer asylum applications than in the previous 12-month period. The proportion staying in hotels – a hot-button issue that has led to protests across the country – has fallen by almost two-thirds (63 per cent) since 2023.
To put it bluntly, that’s not where the political debate is right now. On the same day these statistics were released, a new Ipsos poll found that immigration is the biggest concern for voters, with the number who think it is an important issue rising by nine points since April, to 41 per cent. Regardless of whether you see the government’s immigration policies as justified, on a number of indicators those policies are having their intended effect. But the feeling has not caught up with reality.
Subscribe to the New Statesman for £1 a week
This perception gap has fed into the wider immigration debate. As British Future documents, we tend to wildly overestimate how many people seek asylum: “The average estimate is that a third (33 per cent) of all UK immigration are people seeking asylum, with one in five people (21 per cent) thinking that asylum accounts for half or more of all immigration”. The current figure is nine percent.
Behavioral science has a term for this discrepancy: availability bias. If we can easily imagine an example of something – people in life jackets filled with small rafts, say – our brains tend to overestimate its likelihood. And it appears in other areas of public policy. My colleague Anoosh Chakelian wrote last week about the ‘I’ve been lucky’ syndrome in the NHS: the tendency for people who have experienced improved waiting times to attribute this to good luck, rather than the government achieving a key policy aim. It’s all too easy to picture patients languishing in hospital corridors and for that mental image to overshadow a personal experience of the NHS actually working well.
It is also why the insistence that violent crime has fallen steadily in the UK for a decade is so often ignored. Even when there’s new data, we ignore it: last week we learned that knife robberies have fallen by more than a fifth since the government took office – but Labor is unlikely to get much credit. Meanwhile, fraud, turbocharged by AI, is growing at record rates, but that’s not what people instinctively think of when asked about “crime on the rise.” A knife-wielding robber is a much more visceral image than a nondescript computer screen.
To return to immigration, no government can succeed in a policy area where perception is so dramatically out of step with reality. British Future predicts that by 2028, net migration could be zero or even negative. We must prepare now for what that means – for our economy, our universities, our health and social care systems. Instead, the debate is stuck in 2022. Telling people they’re wrong is rarely a fruitful political strategy. But the next time a political hopeful calls for immigration cuts, we should at least see if they know where it is now. The answer may surprise us.
(Further reading: Nobody believes the NHS is getting better)
Content from our partners
