Much of the public deeply resents the spending priority afforded to migration. We read that the government is being asked to pay yet more money for its hasty and botched cancellation of the Rwanda plan, rubbing salt into wounds when we do not have the deterrent effect of somewhere to send illegal migrants which the government clearly needs. The government pays large sums to the French to stop the boats without conditions and accepts the French have broken their promise to tackle some of the boats in shallow water before they depart when their intentions are clear.The government is paying large sums for hotel accommodation they promised to close down, and paying more to convert older buildings for use as migrant hostels in an attempt to avoid more hotels as illegals continue to arrive. The government is paying top up benefits to migrants, and a full range of benefits to dependents that come to join them. Migrants taking up lower wage employment qualify for subsidised housing, free NHS, free school places and the full range of public services. The press have recently highlighted the costs of providing free English language tuition for recent arrivals. The arrival of a large number of people speaking a wide range of languages has raised language costs in a number of relevant public services.
In 2025-16 the EU was trying to respond to the large numbers of migrants arriving across its borders.They made a proposal that countries that would not take their fair share of these EU arrivals should have to make payments to the countries that did take them. Their calculation suggested that the set up and early year costs of a new low or no pay migrant were 250,000 Euros.
I tried to work out what a similar cost would be for the UK leaving the EU. I saw that the EU figure had plausibility. If many people come then the state does need to build new flats or houses to accommodate them, and these will need to be heavily subsidised with the public sector picking up the initial capital cost. There needs to be more school places and surgery and hospital capacity, with capital costs to increase the capacity of schools and health centres, and with more staff being recruited to man them. Adding more people on a big scale also means putting in more road and rail capacity. Meanwhile the private sector has to spend on more broadband, water, electricity and gas supply.
The case for controlled immigration has been clear and popular with the majority of voters for a long time. The Treasury idea that high levels of migration were fine because they added to GDP was always disbelieved by many of the voters. It is difficult to understand why clever Treasury officials never wanted to highlight the public spending consequences of unrestricted migration when it was bound to have a very visible impact on capital and revenue budgets for key state services and for benefits.