According to Treasury and OBR numbers higher rates of inward migration boost growth and can lower the deficit . It is of course right that if you add in a lot of new low paid migrants GDP goes up. It is also true GDP per head goes down with the encouragement of more low paid employment.
The OBR we read is minded to increase their forecast of the deficit if we have fewer migrants. This is odd. Low paid and no paid migrants need subsidised housing. They need a range of free and subsidised public services. They add to the need to build new roads, surgeries, schools, hospitals, power generation and sewers. Much of this has a direct public spending cost.
The OBR may need to revise its assumption about productivity growth down for other reasons. Public sector productivity is still well below 2019 levels and the public sector is out recruiting. Private sector productivity has the huge headwind of accelerated energy and industrial closures. Oil, gas, petrochemicals and the manufacture of petrol cars all deliver high labour productivity. All are being run down by bans, high energy prices and regulations. Current OBR forecasts say productivity will recover to 2% a year by the end of this decade, and average 1.25%
May 28, 2025
I don’t personally see why we should have a problem with migrant workers who come into this country with skills and proof of offers of employment;They don’t cost the country any money, they pay their taxes and they do jobs which most of the English don’t now want to do; I don’t believe the NHS would be able to survive if it wasn’t for migrant workers coming from the Philippines ,Sri Lanka,India and other parts of the World.They are hard workers who value having any form of employment.They earn a lot more than they can do in their own countries and they send money back to support their families.
As long as they are not a burden on the state, they have pre arranged accommodation and they return to their own countries if required to do so when their visas expire, why should we object to this.
It is in vast contrast to legal and illegal migrants who come to the UK for the sole purpose of feeding off the free services we provide and are a massive burden on UK resources such as housing,NHS and schools.A lot of them don’t pay tax and they give nothing back to the running of the UK and are a burden on state funds and ultimately the tax payer.
We should look at Australia and follow their system of dealing with migrant workers and illegal immigration!
Reply People coming for low wages need subsidised homes and free public services
May 28, 2025
Reply to reply. PLease check the muti-year visa requirements: advance payments/insurance for medical care, proof of funds from self and/or family, proof of living arrangements available without state support.
May 28, 2025
When I brought my wife and her son over we were not asked for anything other than the visa fee.
May 28, 2025
But they come as fake foreign students and work in low paid or black-market jobs ….bypassing the worker visa route
May 28, 2025
The maths is simple. The average tax payer pays £6000 a year in tax. A low paid migrant will receive £12,000 a year in benefits and £12,000 a year in housing costs.
So a low paid migrant takes 4 tax payers out the system. It’s a terrible solution.
Plus medical costs, prison costs, pension costs, pushing up housing costs and rents etc.
It’s doesn’t take much to bankrupt a whole Government system as money is directed to benefits.
May 28, 2025
@ javelin – indeed so, and recall an ample supple of migrants willing to work for low wages drives down the cost of labour, to the benefit of many making purchases who then of course face resulting lower prices.
A downside of course is we have to hear the whinging of the generation Z-ers about high housing costs and poor wages but they are typically amongst the most ardent supporters of open door immigration so I do not engage.
May 28, 2025
@f57, It might help to understand why Generation Z supports open door immigration, has anyone bothered to ask them?
May 28, 2025
@ jerry – you make a sound point. I am unaware of any authoritative study.
May 28, 2025
12+ years of State “Education” followed by Uni-endorsed group-think is obviously very effective.
May 28, 2025
I imagine you know, so do tell us?
May 29, 2025
They apparently believe the world owes them a living and believe they are ‘nice’ people by demanding the world pay up for immigrants too.
It stops them in their tracks when you tell them that they are short of benefits, education, housing and jobs because those who have come have taken their share.
May 28, 2025
Exactly plus roads, social services, police, fire service, defence, airports, water, gas, electricity… infrastructures. Plus they often send any money they earn back home and they depress the wages of others and thus they too pay less tax and claim more benefits. Or perhaps become unemployed and then fully on benefits!
May 28, 2025
@Javelin; You mean the ingenious low paid employee does get such benefits, has the same costs on other taxpayers?! Pull the other one!
But yes it is crazy that a CEO can pay themselves massive bonuses because they have minimized their companies wage bill off the backs of other taxpayers, expecting the in-work benefits system to pick up the slack!
May 28, 2025
Please explain how a migrant worker on a visa which mandates “no recourse to public funds” can receive the public funds you claim.
May 28, 2025
We got child benefit despite my wife and son’s visas being stamped as such
May 28, 2025
And you’re a UK national, yes?
May 28, 2025
They did not ask about me on the application
May 29, 2025
I will assume that the answer you chose not to give is “Yes”.
As a UK national, you do have recourse to public funds, including child benefit, irrespective of the nationality of your son.
May 28, 2025
The average tax payet does not pay £6,000 in tax. in 2024, the median annual salary in the UK was £37,430. Someone at that level, making a 5% pension contribution, pays £1,989 in NI and £4,960 using the standard tax allowances, a total of £6,949 in direct taxation. They will then also pay council tax, VAT, excise duties, VED, IPT etc.
All of that comes to way more than £6,000.
May 28, 2025
Your second para captures the issue, which has not been addressed by all Governments, and why select England when the problem affects all UK?
May 28, 2025
Immigrants bring imported to do the jobs Brits won’t do is a sticking plaster and a costly one.
We need to revise the benefits system to encourage work, whatever it is.
Can’t eat, might work.
May 28, 2025
“I don’t believe the NHS would be able to survive if it wasn’t for migrant workers coming from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India and other parts of the World.”
This is what they want you to believe. We managed for thousands of years with low immigration, so why do we need it now? Something is very off. We need to get the lazy people of working age off benefits and into work. We have become a country of entitled, feckless, weak people where work doesn’t pay.
May 28, 2025
Good morning.
I can only paraphrase what the PM said himself – That MASS IMMIGRATION has shown no real increase in GDP. Now either he is wrong or, the OBR is ? And as we all know, the OBR does not have a good track record with its stats and predictions.
May 28, 2025
Mark – this seems to be a rare example of Starmer being correct. Government analysis says you need to be in top 40% of earners to be a net contributor to the state. How many migrants achieve that?
May 28, 2025
@PeteB; How many of the ingenious population achieve that, being a top 40% of earner?!
But such jobs still need to be done, and in a free market capitalist system they can only pay the market rate for the job, the only other solution is to off-shore such jobs…
May 28, 2025
How many of the indigenous population are 40% earners? I’d hazard a guess its about 40% of those who work.
We have 9 million people of working age who are not in employment. Plenty of them to do the jobs that need to be done. And offshoring jobs means the work is done abroad, not that overseas workers come to the UK.
And to clarify the top 40% contribute more in tax than they get in benefits. Allow for the cost of state services and scarcely any ‘break even’, which is why the Government needs to borrow billions every year.
May 28, 2025
@PeteB; Sorry, I though your reference to the top 40% was in reference to the level of pay, not the number employed…
Not everything is off-shorable, nor should many things that are off-shored be so, security of supply and all that.
May 28, 2025
Another solution is to invest in automation and machinery and improvements to the processes to reduce the need for cheap labour.
Why spend large sums on such improvements if as an employer you have queues of minimum wage people availsble for employment in your business?
Perhaps it’s one reason GDP per head and productivity are not doing well.
May 28, 2025
@Sam; Run that past us again; so you want greater automation, meaning less jobs, which means more cost on the benefit system, from less income taxes and VAT…
“Why spend large sums on such improvements if as an employer you have queues of minimum wage people availsble for employment in your business?”
Because automation is not necessarily as cheap as chips; and in any case employment is actually a food for the economy, pay someone real money to make widgets and they will spend, that means someone else gets a job making washing machines or motor cars or build a new house etc.
May 28, 2025
Not less jobs Jerry because if you are not competitive and if you don’t modernise your business with the latest methods and equipment those jobs will disappear when the business they work for eventually fails.
Are you against robot spray painting and robot welding machines in the automotive industries?
They release people from dull repetitive jobs who can transfer to more enjoyable value adding skillful jobs in the same business.
With your logic people would still be cutting corn with scythes instead of using a combine harvester.
May 28, 2025
Indeed how can people working at near minimum wages ever pay for the circa £1 M per household needed for the captial expenses and investments need for their housing, their children education, roads, schools, energy capacity, police, prisons, social services, health care, airports, legal aid lawyers and all the many states parasitic pen pushers and QUANGOs…
May 28, 2025
Minimum wage earners rarely contribute more in tax and NI than they get back in immediate direct benefits like school places, rates relief, rent support, health care…
Public sector productivity is still well below 2019 levels and the public sector is out recruiting.
Remind me what the state sector produces? Half of what is does is of negative value anyway? Things like the Covid Lockdowns, the net harm Covid Vaccines, Net Zero rip off energy, over regulation of everything, delaying and refusing planning, stopping runways, power stations, drilling, mining, employment, pushing the wealthy overseas, taxing people too much then wasting it… (they would almost invariably have used it better).
May 28, 2025
So why are enormous numbers of workers on minimum wage? Probably because businesses are hit with crazy high costs in this country, and even when a profit is possible they get taxed close to giving up!
May 28, 2025
Indeed businesses are over taxed, over regulated, premises are expensive, interest rates high, insurance high, bank charges high and it is hard to sell other than at rather low prices. Also excessive employment regulations. Why bother taking the risk the government will take most of you money off in the end even if it goes well.
May 28, 2025
Now we’re getting somewhere. “Always ask why.”
May 28, 2025
I don’t think many voters ever believed the argument from those on the left, the Lib-Dims, and some of the conservatives that inward migration was of net benefit to the country. Even Starmer had to adopted the
logical view that it isn’t, and almost the entire population wants to see us get our country back.
The OBR is just plain wrong. The only GDP statistic that counts is GDP per capita. That was always the case, but those in favour of swathes of migrants being brought here tried for years to convince us that the obvious was not true and that gross the GDP number was what counted.
Immense damage has been done, so much that it is now plain for all to see that the population has been allowed to become out of control. Especially under the two most recent Conservative Prime Ministers. The party is rightly being severely punished for allowing this to happen under its control, as well as a long list of other things, especially the foolish and unaffordable religion of Net Zero. That is Starmer and the Left’s biggest mistake. We cannot fix what needs to be done while Miliband is culling well paid jobs and profitable businesses in the interest of climate change.
This, of course, is what has given Reform an opportunity to lead a massive change of direction. Does anyone believe that Net Zero will survive the next election campaign ? I don’t mind their proposed changes to child benefit and I can put up with rheir increase in the personal allowance, as long as all universal benefits become taxable.
May 28, 2025
The voters have been here before, The Promised Land beckons…..vote xxxxx.
Have ‘Reform *been given* an opportunity to lead a massive change of direction’?
Polls etc appear to report the lowest rating for the PM & Government in most voters’ memories.
Seems like a shoo-in?
May 28, 2025
“Current OBR forecasts say productivity will recover to 2% a year by the end of this decade, and average 1.25%”
They will be lucky to get even this pathetic growth as almost everything Labour is doing is against productivity and our ability to compete. Rip off energy, recruiting on diversity ground rather than merit, the worker rights bill, renewables, banning drilling, fracking, petrol cars, mining, virgin steel production… red tape everywhere, taxing people to death or to leave, the dire rule of lawyers and vested interest QUANGOS …
May 28, 2025
State sector far to large and hugely inefficient often doing net harm – making the private sector rather uncompetitive too.
May 28, 2025
Just as a hospital should be responsible and care for its patients, the Govt should constantly know exactly how many immigrants are in its premises and monitor their situation precisely to maintain proper control and health of our nation.
Some will have mental issues, create risk or need to be held in a strait jacket to prevent them from setting fire to the premises or harming others, spurred on by religious ideology or devious intent. Some need intensive care to stabilise and cope for themselves and their children, needing temporary assistance, but doing productive work in due course.
Many can be dealt with in a day, receiving proper treatment without having to stay in overnight. Most may need solely a monthly check-up to ensure they are progressing constructively for the well-being of all our citizens. All those malingering, occupying valuable bed and room space our own citizens need, just to live free at our expense should be removed immediately.
All those people entering our nation’s premises illegally who are the responsibility of some other nation to care for should be prevented at source by having secure checkpoints at every entrance.
May 28, 2025
@Bloke; Your last sentence is laughable, let me guess, you live many miles from the coast. What do you suggest, a secure Boarder Force checkpoint between every Groyne?… 😉
Not sure what the coastal hospitality industry would think, might as well shut up shop if the holiday makers can’t access the beach without taking their passports!
May 28, 2025
finally we get humour. Carry on the good work.
May 28, 2025
Great post Bloke.
May 28, 2025
@LL: “the circa £1 M per household needed for the captial expenses and investments need for their housing”
You raise an interesting, if perhaps unintended, question.
What does it actually cost to build a house and link it to the services etc?
I have read suggestions that a typical house costs just 1/3rd the asking price on a new build, some also claim that includes the land value too.
May 28, 2025
Well you can build a fairly basic 4 bed detached house 1000sq ft. for about £300k but just the house. Less in some regions but then you have land costs, interest, utility connections, often social housing costs, access roads, building control, stamp duty, agents sales costs, insurance costs, LEA surcharges, bat survey costs etc. OTT building regs soon to include heat pumps, solar panels, ev car chargers, disable access, expensive over insulation, water run off restrictions and the rest.
But new arrivals also need a portions of schools, police station, prison, roads, government offices, power stations, electric and gas grid, universities, internet… so far more than just the house and land.
May 28, 2025
@LL; I strongly suspect you totally miss understood my question, hence why your £300k figure looks more a low end average asking price.
What is the basic cost, in other words before anything else, how much do the bricks and mortar, the roof tiles, the plumbing, the concrete etc cost, and the labour to do the work. What is the actual cost to the utility companies to make a connection, not what they bill to the construction company?
There will be little, or shouldn’t be, any great veneration on those costs due to location, perhaps a up-tick within the M25, or out in the wilds, but that’s why people ask for averages.
All the other costs I agree might be an issue, that is why I asked for a base-point cost, although I’m not sure why there would be any additional social housing costs, unless you mean a levy.
May 28, 2025
You seem to make a case for the State, or Local auathority cutting out endless middlemen and costs by taking over the nation’s housebuilding.
Sounds good to me.
May 29, 2025
Jerry
LL listed a load of add on costs beyond the £300,000 basic cost.
I’m wondering if you understand the difference between the basic costs to a business of doing a project, before they have to add on a marginal profit.
May 30, 2025
That is what I gave about £300 per sq foot on level ground. More in some areas due to higher labour costs, congestion charges, parking charges, delivery costs in remote areas, theft of tools and higher insurance…just the house build costs and to comply with OTT building control.
May 28, 2025
A four bedroom house needs to be a lot bigger than 1000sq ft.
One built down to that size will have no room for wardrobes in the bedrooms and little storage elsewhere.
The average new four bedroom detached house is at least 1400sq ft and that is not a spacious house by any means ! Within the existing housing stock, four bedroom houses average around 1600-1800 sq ft.
Most people would find a four bedroom house less than at least 1800 sq ft very small. The problem is we buy houses on the number of bedrooms where everywhere else prices houses by the floor area which is far more sensible.
It is also why UK families almost never park cars in their garage : it is usually full of the gear that they can’t fit in the house or garden !
May 28, 2025
and sheds are required for ‘house’ storage.
May 30, 2025
Indeed but many modern three or even four bed houses in cities are only circa 1000sq ft plus a garage only if rather lucky.
May 28, 2025
The OBR costs us £4.3m pa. It’s not independent of the Blob. There are surely some sound arguments to scrap it and source economic forecasts elsewhere. The forecasts might be more realistic, though as with all economic forecasts, they’re unlikely to be highly accurate.
Oh, and perhaps change our relationship with the BoE, too? How has its record as an “independent” body for 28 years compared to the previous 302 years?
May 28, 2025
@Wanderer; Reform will be quite happy to see the back of the OBR, no difficult questions about how they are to fund their tax cuts and benefits give-away should they win the next election…
May 28, 2025
Between Treasury, OBR, and government there is such a cats cradle of incompetence, combined with no defined discernable target as to where we are aiming to be in one year or ten years that they render themselves redundant.
One of the greatest challenges for an incoming Reform government will be to find the talent to run finances run by treasury alone. Were I in Nigel’s shoes I would be seeking out the grandsons of Sir Keith Joseph now. I see no possibility of running the country’s finances using people who have no track record of achievment in the real commercial world.
As for tracking and identifying illegal immigrants in the UK, a national biometric ID card is the answer. As there were 23 means of acceptable ID cited for the last local election I see no objection to a definative national one to cover a legitimate presence in the UK.
May 28, 2025
@ agricola – the objection to ID cards is not so much the cards themselves (that, recall, only represent the front end of a system) but that the whole system would be used to link all records held by officialdom in one vast database, thereby facilitating the destruction of legitimate privacy interests and the prospect of considerable abuse.
The State holds a vast amount of data about individuals, from records of tax, health, education, property ownership, social security, licences, passports, etc.. At present, that information is not, typically, linked. Also, some records at present are designed not to facilitate a lifetimes’ tracking, for example passports do not assign one number for life, rather each new passport gets a new number. With an ID card system that does link all records for ever, all the protections and benefits of the present arrangements would be lost, lost to a government with a poor record in data protection.
May 28, 2025
@f57; A rather shallow argument against ID cards. If the State wants to track someone they already have more than enough data, hard or soft, all accessible via various linked and unlinked databases. What is often missing though is a ‘commonality of purpose’, thus a human needs to physically ask for access to other records, a national ID card would not change that, just reduce the box filling, one number, rather than name, address, post code, passport No., NI number etc.
There seemed to be two groups most opposed to the Blair era proposal for national ID cards, those with a legitimate concern about why the individual should have to fund out of their own purse their Statutory ID card; and those who simply prefer to exist in a shadow society, anything that makes it difficult to track people was bad, such as the use of ANPR cameras for example – despite, or because of, their worth in tackling crime.
May 28, 2025
@ jerry – the “missing commonality of purpose” might make all the difference though.
Your second paragraph sets up two straw men I think for there were more substantial objections. When you say “…difficult to track people was bad” did you mean easy, otherwise I do not follow?
May 29, 2025
@f57; Yes there was a typo, indeed I did mean “easy”.
Not sure there was a straw men, perhaps a simplification, I note you gave no indication of what those other groups you mention were worried about.
.
What is wrong with the State tracking people, as long as there are safeguards; as I said merely having a unique ID number will not change anything, more worrying would be the deployment of say AI and allowing it to link to every possible government database, but that concern exists even today.
May 28, 2025
No honest person has anything to fear from an ID card.
May 28, 2025
As someone who worked for mod for 40 years , I have to say they were a pain and I was glad to leave it as I walked out the door
May 28, 2025
@MFD; As a one time contractor to the MOD, entering some very restricted places, I must say having to produce suitable ID was a pain, it would have been far easier had we had a national ID card.
May 28, 2025
@ Chris S – but much to fear from an issuer abusing its powers.
May 29, 2025
@f57; Whatever the system, if a government wants to abuse its powers they will do so; whilst the absolute right to be anonymous vanished 85 years ago, if not before.
May 28, 2025
First we have to establish that the OBR was created by Gideon
It has never been correct since it was established.
It has gone remarkably quiet about th ruinous policies of Rachel from complaints but was very vocal in removing Truss.
I think it wouldn’t be correct to say like the BoE it is staffed by left wing academics who embrace mass immigration.
Khan was spouting his usual nonesense that a skulled immigrant adds more to the exchequer than a comparable Brit. He makes no mention of health, education or any public service plus they tend to have more children in some cases wives.
Even the HoL established that if the average channel invaders lived to be 80 they would cost the taxpayer £150,000 or closer to a million if they live to be a hundred.
I volunteer at our local hospital, I estimate at least half in A&E shouldn’t be in the country and are using massive NHS resources.
We do not need the OBR telling us what Joe public knows is complete cobblers
May 28, 2025
The OBR has one fundamental challenge. It is required to assume that politicians will actually do what they say they will do.
May 28, 2025
@Ian; “[the OBR] has never been correct since it was established.”
Was it ever intended to be, given its job was to report on the fictitious era of “Austerity”; as with any spreadsheet, nonsense-in = nonsense-out!
May 28, 2025
So King Charles in Canada said “I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. This land acknowledgement is a recognition of shared history as a nation. While continuing to deepen my own understanding, it is my great hope that in each of your communities, and collectively as a country, a path is found toward truth and reconciliation, in both word and deed.” So is he going to be a joint King with the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people’s leader?
Why say this? Will he go back in the UK to the various tribes and rulers and witter about the land of the Normans or the Romans. He also used the word “plurality” rather than “diversity” now rather out of fashion!
May 28, 2025
Isn’t it strange how the British Establishment (and assorted Globalists) can recognise the Indigenous Peoples of SOME lands, but not their own.
May 28, 2025
Nor those Lands and watere of the Chagosians – whose lands they have given away! Rather than worse than given actually paid to give away!
May 28, 2025
According to the DT, the IMF is concerned about the power of the OBR and thinks Rachel-from-Complaints should “de-emphasise” the intense focus on her headroom. That sounds suspiciously to me like “changing the rules of the game because you’re losing it.”
The IMF proposes: “Rachel Reeves has been urged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to curb the power of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) by “refining” the fiscal rules. Luc Eyraud, the IMF’s mission chief in the UK, said the Chancellor should take steps to “de-emphasise” the intense focus on the headroom she has in her Budget at any given time. Doing so would relieve some of the pressure facing Ms Reeves as even small shifts in the forecasts can force her into large tax and spending changes. The IMF suggested ministers should change the OBR’s mandate to make it only assess the likelihood of the Chancellor hitting her fiscal rules once a year.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/27/imf-upgrades-uk-growth-warning-trade-war-hit-ahead-reeves/
I’m sure there will be howls of rage from The Treasury followed by (Treasury-generated) panic in the Bond Markets at the IMF’s suggestion that the OBR’s Assessments shouldn’t be treated as the equivalent of Holy Writ.
May 28, 2025
Prima facie the IMF seems to be making a sound enough point, that requiring panic measures to force compliance in the face of immaterial breach of an artificial rule is a nonsense when such measures could easily have a worse impact than the breach. The IMF does of course start with the false assumption it is perhaps required to make that Wrecker Reeves knows what she is about.
May 28, 2025
I wonder how long it will be before Rachel-from-Complaints accepts “the advice” of the IMF … and Brer Andrew Bailey lays low and says nuthin’.
May 28, 2025
I give up.
It would seem that any government organisation that fails to use common-sense and basic logic within its calculations, is a complete waste of time and money.
Likewise politicians who fail to see, read, or understand human nature and what affect that may have on their proposals, which is one of the many reasons why so many policies fail, and we have 9,000,000 people of an age who can work, who do not bother.
May 28, 2025
With Labour’s war on employers, they aren’t likely to find work anyway.
May 28, 2025
S A
Agreed so even more on Benefits, the Policies of madness.
May 28, 2025
I see it has been reported that some families in London are now getting up to £23,000 a year in rent subsidies alone, because their rent is so high, and this is on top of other benefits, no wonder people do not bother to work !
May 28, 2025
Which in turn pushes up rents further causing more “customers” to seek assistance
May 28, 2025
N S
Exactly
May 28, 2025
@Berkshire Alan. I wonder how much of that rent subsidy goes to Labour local authorities?
May 28, 2025
You forgot to mention the extra cost of higher corporate taxes and employers NIC imposed on businesses. No wonder entrepreneurs are voting with their feet and their wallets to move to more business and wealth friendly countries.
The idea, used by successive Chancellors, that an OBR forecast five years out justifies give away spending action today is as absurd as it is foolish. It will not be “alright on the night” as they pretend and posture that it will be. The sooner they focus on the here and now and the financial position over the next twelve months the better. The fact that the OBR forecasts for current year debt are tens of billions adrift within months of their publication should be warning enough that they produce works of fiction.
May 28, 2025
The Treasury and the OBR should think of one thing in particular. Tony Blair let migration rip from 1997 onwards yet from 2000 onwards our GDP growth rate has fallen. We have had 28 years of excess and mass migration and if increasing migration has the net effect of increasing GDP then our economy should have been growing at 1990’s plus levels. Instead we have been growing at round 2% (about half of 1990s levels).
Part of that reason is exporting our manufacturing sector to China and the loss of jobs and consumer spending, another is the friction of being a high tax economy throughout but it is also due to the friction of excess / mass migration itself.
Excess / mass migration compresses wages for low income earners and increases their rents too. This reduces our organic growth. It also puts everyone’s taxes up as migrants need public services and huge numbers are on welfare and child support for life. That is all a deadweight loss to our economy and a headwind to organic growth.
It also lowers labour productivity as we have too much cheap labour doing low-income jobs and we have therefore become inefficient another headwind to economic growth.
Any economic undergraduate understands this. Indeed the BoE and ONS have directly cited the wage compression and labour productivity factors in their MPC minutes and reports.
So why does the Treasury and OBR only repeat a single part of the equation that more migration equals more headline growth when the full equation proves it leads to lower growth? Are they stupid or manipulative? It is the latter. They are woke-Marxists who want mass migration for ideological reasons. They should all be fired and replaced with proper economists.
May 28, 2025
Odd that the OBR which supposedly has expertise on data and modelling would lump all migrants together into a single group. There are plenty of studies which show that migrants from some countries – USA for example – increase GDP and GDP per head whereas those from some other countries – Afghanistan for example – decrease GDP. They have the data to base and report their predictions on a more granular level like that. They don’t want to of course.
May 28, 2025
That’s why they consistently get things wrong, but the government accepts their forecasts as if holy writ. Wrong modelling, a bit like the climate change crowd who have used wrong models for years to produce the result they want. Rubbish input, rubbish output.
May 28, 2025
+1
May 28, 2025
Sir John
You’re thinking today, prompts ‘one’ or may be two questions – when was the last time was the OBR correct?
How much does the OBR cost the taxpayer?
May 28, 2025
So the OBR seems to be using a base asssumption that immigrants are net contributors to the UK economy.
This is heavily based on the idea that immigrants are young and will take many years to draw a pension and they are light NHS users.
This seems to be an argument that is skewed as it does not appear to sufficiently take into account the cost of subsidising low wages, the cost of maternity services and the need to provide schools.
If the OBR is using bad data (remember that most of its forecasts are wrong most of the time) then what is the government doing about it? Surely the first thing to do is ignore their forecasts and advice?
May 28, 2025
The OBR sets its planning against logic to distort our economic situation. Like so many organisations they provide data to make us imagine that our country is not being slowly destroyed or in other circumstances to alter our perception of what is happening.
Our PM set the tone with his double-speak, and while we can’t believe a word he says, too many other quangos and representatives are emulating him. It’s all part of the effort to deceive us, keep our eyes closed, so that we don’t spot the next emergency, the next attack on our freedoms, coming on.
Whatever the quango, whatever the minister, we have reached a stage in our devolution where the truth is heavily disguised and misinformation rules.
May 28, 2025
What devolution ?
85% of our population (the English ) have seen no devolution whatsoever.
May 29, 2025
I’m talking about devolving of the economy, our country!
May 28, 2025
“It is also true GDP per head goes down with the encouragement of more low paid employment.”
So why didn’t the last Tory govt raise the NMW [1] to say £20 ph, other than it would make the UK uncompetitive. Nor is it just the level of pay, our youth gets a dream promised these days by what passes for career guidance, go get a Degree and earn your fortune, so no surprise then when many don’t want to work ‘menial’ jobs, at least not ones involving long (unsociable) hours and/or dirty working conditions etc. Thus if not migrant workers, just who will do such work, and no “AI” is not (necessarily) the answer.
[1] now, for political effect, called the NLW, which it is not
“Low paid and no paid migrants need subsidised housing. They need a range of free and subsidised public services.”
Anyone on low pay or no pay requires subsidised housing etc, not just migrants.
“They add to the need to build new roads, surgeries, schools, hospitals, power generation and sewers. Much of this has a direct public spending cost.”
As do any new household unit, be it migrant or not, as does any relocation, after all when someone moves from one location in the UK to another they do not take their old roads, surgeries, schools, hospitals with them!
May 28, 2025
It’s about the growth in numbers
We used to have annual new arrivals in the tens of thousands for decades post war.
Since 2000 it has been hundreds of thousands per year.
Recently it was one million net in one year.
It isn’t possible to cope with that level of increase in the UK being already densely populated especially in our major cities.
It is also virtually impossible to build the infrastructure needed fast enough to cope with that speed of population growth.
And as a side issue how does this level of immigration impact our legal requirement to achieve Net Zero?
May 28, 2025
@Sam; It is an equation of many forms, arrivals, those leaving the workforce, those dying, and whether certain demographics actually want to do certain types of work.
“Recently it was one million net in one year.”
OK, an explicit question, taking 2023 as a reference year, as the figures should be available: How many migrants arrived in 2023 and entered the workforce, how many people already legally resident here in the UK permanently left the workforce in 2023, how many babies were born in 2002 and thus those now adults entered the employment market by age 21 – did the workforce shrink, expand, remain the same?
“It is also virtually impossible to build the infrastructure needed fast enough to cope with that speed of population growth.”
Nonsense, you need to research just how quickly UK New Towns grew from the late 1950s in to the 1970s. The problem is not technical, its a simple unwillingness. And as I’ve said before, who is claiming that migrants will all want to live in the same place anyway, just how difficult would it be for each and every conurbation of a 10,000 current population size to absorb even 50 migrants?
“And as a side issue how does this level of immigration impact our legal requirement to achieve Net Zero?”
That really does take the prize for the most desperate of comments, short of those that go all out on the unpleasantness scale. Nut hayho, hopw about giving each and every migrant a bicycle!
Reply How can you make rapid progress in cutting UK CO 2 if you keep adding people? They all need fossil fuel energy,food etc to live.
May 30, 2025
As an example of illogical, nonsensical argumenative waffling, this post is perhaps your best ever Jerry
So, well done on that.
PS
I see Sir John has demolished you last passive aggressive ridiculous argument.
May 30, 2025
Thanks Martin
Well said.
May 28, 2025
With our highly politicised and activist civil service, it is increasingly unlikely that we can trust statistics from our government. There is a tendency for them to emerge in favour of the left/government and then to be revised in the opposite direction. Outrage relating to statistics is selective, depending on who is in power.
May 28, 2025
The (abysmal) forecasting record of the OBR is such that it is surprising that anyone deigns to treat them with any degree of credence.
May 28, 2025
Problem is that millions of native Britains are unproductive (and many of them will still not work harder even if they were paid a lot more which businesses can’t afford). But we can’t bring in more immigrants either (except highly skilled ones). So what to do? It’s why taxes in UK will always remain relatively high to pay social security etc.
The only solution is a radical cultural reboot to get people to have more work ethic, be more responsible, be more family-minded, to be depend more on family than state, to eat healthily and take lots of exercise, and to be more patriotic etc. And this can only come from people in the churches, education, media and arts – not politicians. Although politicians can help take a lead in this. To encourage those in the churches, education, media and arts of the need for this.
And politicians trying to use just politics to fix these huge problem, which are cultural ultimately in origin – not political – is like Don Quixote attacking the windmills ..
May 28, 2025
The OBR was set up in 2010 by the Tory Party to provide independent scrutiny of the government’s current finances and projections. It is currently run by a civil servant who previously worked for HM Treasury.
May 28, 2025
Why don’t we hold univesities to account for student overstayers …at the very least we should secure foreign student passports
May 28, 2025
The sheer volume of immigrants makes a nonsense of the OBR’s forecasts. Our welfare state and benefits system is going to collapse because of immigration. Equally this ignorant government will spend money it has not got, the Chagos islands surrender, the EU surrender which will cost the UK a fortune, scrapping the two child cap, restoring the pensioners fuel benefit, surrendering to the Unions on pay.
Then they will be surprised when the UK is bankrupt and the IMF impose real austerity on the country.
Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner, David Lammy, Yvette Cooper and chief idiot, Milliband, have not a clue how to manage the UK economy. What an incompetent shower they are!
May 28, 2025
there are a lot of things they don’t account for, including the systematic industrial scale theft of British intellectual property getting moved abroad where it is used to undercut this country on world markets… if that was accounted for properly it would blow any financial case for immigration out of the water!