UK Migration — A Reference for Policymakers

For civil servants, policy advisers, ministers, and opposition staff. The combined pack: front matter, the options menu (twenty policy options across the spectrum), the master comparative analysis of party positions, and the framings and stakeholder perspectives most relevant to policy formation. Approximately 21,000 words.

How to use this pack

This pack assembles the elements of the master document most useful for policymakers and decision-makers needing to weigh options, understand the operational and legal landscape, and act. It includes:

1. Front matter — executive summary, reading guide, glossary, framing transparency 2. Part II: Options Menu — 14 numbered policy levers + 3 illustrative packages, each scored on benefits, negatives, costs, savings, legal exposure, deliverability, and evidence quality 3. Part V: Master Comparative Overview — how parties' positions compare on each policy axis (essential for coalition-building and positioning) 4. Part VIII: Implementation, Forward Analysis, Legal Architecture — implementation roadmaps, MEL framework, legal deep-dive, scenario stress-tests, returns leverage analysis, GDP-per-capita analysis 5. Section 19: Boriswave — settlement-policy-critical cohort analysis

For evidence underpinning options (Part I), the master document or the data-and-evidence pack is the companion.

For ideological framings, the 7 framing articles are companions.

For numerical claims, source keys point to the data workbook.

Executive Summary

This document is a comprehensive reference on UK migration and benefits policy as it stands in May 2026. It does not advocate a single policy direction. It lays out the evidence, the available policy options, what each major political party would do, and four parallel framings (cohesion, refugee protection, demographic, AI labour market) that select and weight the same evidence differently.

1. Net migration has fallen sharply — but the headline figure obscures three different flows. Year ending June 2025 net migration: ~204,000, down from 649,000 a year earlier (ONS provisional, November 2025). Composition: non-EU+ nationals +383,000 net, EU+ nationals −70,000 net, British nationals −109,000 net. The headline figure of 204,000 is what is left after non-EU arrivals are offset by 179,000 net departures of EU citizens and British nationals. 76% of British emigrants were aged under 35 (ONS, year ending March 2025). Most of the fall in net migration reflects measures introduced under the previous government, and the fall is real, but two-thirds of the apparent fall is also a function of British and EU emigration running at high levels — particularly young British emigration.

Where they are going is partly known, partly not. The new RAPID methodology counts British emigrants but does not yet publish destinations. Stock data (UN estimates of the 4.8 million British citizens overseas in 2024) shows just over half are in Australia (~23%), the United States, Canada, New Zealand, or Spain. Older flow data (LTIM) and recent survey/relocation-firm data suggest the dominant pattern is young Brits to Anglophone destinations for career, with rising flows to the UAE (particularly Dubai) for tax-and-career reasons among professionals and HNWIs, plus growing interest in Portugal, Thailand, and the wider Gulf.

Why they are going splits into two different stories with different evidence quality. Thread one — young Britons, the 76% under 35 — is the larger story and has reasonable evidence. Survey work (TEFL Academy, March 2026; Migration Observatory qualitative research) finds 86% of UK 18-34s saying UK wages do not reflect the cost of living, 79% reporting constant financial pressure, and primary cited motivations being career opportunity, higher wages, work-life balance, climate, and the new feasibility of cross-border remote work (a Brit can work for a London startup from Lisbon at one-third the housing cost). Thread two — HNWI/non-dom departures — is genuinely happening but the published numbers are heavily contested. The Henley & Partners "16,500 UK millionaires leaving in 2025" figure has been forensically critiqued by tax-policy.org.uk and the Tax Justice Network as marketing material rather than statistical analysis; even taking it at face value, 16,500 is 0.63% of UK millionaires, 81% of UK millionaires polled (Patriotic Millionaires UK, June 2025) say it is patriotic to pay a fair share, and 80% support a wealth tax over £10m. The cited motivations for the HNWI thread (non-dom abolition, IHT and CGT changes, ILR uncertainty) are real, but the scale is widely overstated in the press. Thread three, missing from the Henley reports and not separately broken out in ONS data, is upper-middle-class professionals (£150k–£500k earners) — a group large enough to matter for the tax base but for which destination/motivation data is essentially absent.

The Migration Observatory states explicitly: "Relatively little is known about which British citizens leave the UK, or the reasons why." The new ONS RAPID methodology (DWP tax/benefit-records-based) is classed as "official statistics in development" and figures are subject to revision.

2. Lifetime fiscal contribution varies sharply by route. MAC modelling (December 2025): Skilled Worker main applicants +£689,000 lifetime per person; Family partner route -£109,000; Health & Care Worker dependants -£67,000. These are modelled not measured figures.

3. Asylum accommodation procurement is the largest documented cost overrun. Original 10-year estimate £4.5bn; current expected total £15.3bn (3.4× original). Hotels £170/person/day vs dispersal £27/day. Three suppliers (Clearsprings, Mears, Serco) reported total profit of £383m across the AASC contracts September 2019 – August 2024 at 7% average margin (NAO May 2025; supplier-reported and unaudited).

4. Voluntary returns are 11× cheaper than enforced. £4,300/person voluntary vs £48,800/person enforced. Year ending December 2025 (Home Office, separate counts): 9,914 enforced returns; 28,004 voluntary returns (of which 10,260 assisted within the voluntary category); 18,279 port returns; 5,634 FNO returns. The categories are not summed in headline reporting because of overlap (FNO returns may also be counted as enforced or voluntary depending on mechanism).

5. Universal Credit caseload by immigration status. 8.4 million people were on Universal Credit in January 2026. DWP records 84.5% in the "CTA — UK, Ireland, Right of Abode" group, of whom 99.9% were UK citizens; 9.0% under the EU Settlement Scheme; 2.6% under ILR; 1.6% as refugees; 0.9% under limited leave; 0.6% humanitarian; 0.4% other; and 0.3% with no status recorded. This is an immigration-status table, not a nationality or visa-route table.

6. AI is currently displacing high-paid white-collar work faster than low-paid migrant-dependent sectors. King's College London October 2025 study: firms with high AI exposure cut total employment 4.5%, junior positions 5.8% (2021-2025). UK digital sector employment fell for first time in a decade in 2024. Hospitality (low AI exposure) accounted for 53% of UK job losses October 2024 – August 2025 — those losses not AI-driven.

7. Most asylum claims from current high-volume small-boat-arrival nationalities are well-founded. Sudan grant rate 96%, Eritrea 88%, Iran high. Top 5 small-boat nationalities (Eritrean 19%, Afghan 12%, Iranian 11%, Sudanese 11%, Somali 9%) include four with grant rates above 70%.

Three illustrative policy packages (Part II sets out the full options menu):

• Package A — Restoration: Asylum procurement reform, Earned Settlement implementation, Migration Fiscal Ledger publication, voluntary returns scaling, integration investment. Budget-neutral or modestly net-positive over a Parliament. Cross-partisan deliverable.
• Package B — Restriction: Numerical caps, retrospective ILR restriction, ECHR withdrawal, Removals Force expansion, NRPF expansion. High legal exposure; large up-front cost; uncertain net-fiscal outcome.
• Package C — Investment: Safe legal routes, faster asylum processing, right-to-work for asylum seekers, integration investment at Danish-model scale, regional differentiation. Higher short-term fiscal cost; better long-term integration and contribution outcomes.

• Fiscal frame (Parts I-IV): privileges contribution data; supports route-differentiated policy; favours procurement reform and Earned Settlement.
• Cohesion frame (Part V.1): privileges pace control and integration investment; supports residential dispersal and English-language requirements with support; rejects cultural-essentialist framing.
• Protection frame (Part V.2): privileges international obligations and grant-rate evidence; supports safe legal routes, faster processing, right-to-work; rejects deterrence framing.
• Demographic frame (Part V.3): privileges population structure and OBR sustainability modelling; supports continued migration at scale; rejects net-negative targets without compensating fertility policy.
• AI frame (Part V.4): privileges labour-market displacement evidence; supports adaptive sectoral planning; complicates restrictionist assumptions about automation replacing migrant labour.

The strongest cross-partisan opportunities (where every major party agrees):

• Asylum hotel exit and procurement reform
• Voluntary returns expansion at the cost differential
• Foreign National Offender removal expansion
• Smuggling-network disruption
• Migration Fiscal Ledger publication

The genuine fault lines (where parties sharply differ):

• ECHR retention vs withdrawal
• Retrospective ILR restriction
• Numerical caps on legal migration
• Asylum claim rights for new illegal entrants
• Family route conditions
• NRPF policy
• Mass deportation operations
• Integration investment scale
• Safe legal routes scale

The data in Part I is largely measured and officially published. The MAC and OBR lifetime fiscal modelling is modelled, not measured. The order-of-magnitude estimates in Part II combine cohort projections, take-up rates, and population averages; each input has wide uncertainty. The AI labour-market evidence is the most rapidly evolving body of evidence in this document and some figures will be out of date within twelve months.

The party briefings (Part III) and framing articles (Part V) are deliberately directional — written from inside specific worldviews to make the strongest version of each case. They are not neutral analyses. Parts I-IV are evidence-led but fiscally framed; they privilege fiscal-balance analysis because that is where published data is densest.

Reading Guide

Executive Summary → Part II (Options Menu) → Part V (Master Comparative) → Part IV briefing for your party → Part VI framing most relevant to your portfolio. Approximately 25,000 words.

Full Part I (Data Foundation) → Workbook for verification → Part VI (all seven framing articles) → Part II options as reference. Approximately 30,000 words plus workbook.

Executive Summary → Part V (Master Comparative) → Part IV briefings for the parties you cover → Part VI framings to understand alternative perspectives. Approximately 18,000 words.

Executive Summary → Part VI framing articles (cohesion, protection, demographic, AI, capacity, emigration, sovereignty) → selected Part IV briefings. Approximately 15,000 words.

Your party's Part IV briefing first, then comparative briefings of parties you compete with, then Part V comparative, then Part VI framing articles relevant to your party's positioning. Approximately 12,000 words plus comparative material.

Approximately 80,000 words. Allow 6-8 hours.

Glossary of Acronyms and Terms

AASC — Asylum Accommodation and Support Contracts. Three regional contracts held by Clearsprings Ready Homes, Mears Group, and Serco from 2019, replacing the previous COMPASS contracts.

AIRE — Advice, Issue Reporting and Eligibility. National contract for asylum-seeker support helpline, held by Migrant Help.

ASSV — Acute Skills Shortage Visa. Reform UK proposed visa with mandatory domestic-worker training requirement.

B1, B2 — Common European Framework of Reference for Languages levels. B1 is intermediate (currently the Skilled Worker requirement); B2 is upper intermediate (the requirement from January 2026 for new applicants and from 2027 for ILR).

BNO — British Nationals (Overseas). Hong Kong-related citizenship status; the BNO Visa scheme operates separately from other visa routes.

Boriswave — Informal political term for the 2022-2024 net migration peak (906,000 in 2023) that occurred under previous Conservative governments.

BSAS — British Social Attitudes Survey. National survey conducted annually by NatCen Social Research.

CBI — Confederation of British Industry. Major employer body engaged in migration policy.

CTA — Common Travel Area. UK-Ireland free movement framework predating EU membership; remains in force after Brexit under the Ireland Act 1949.

DWP — Department for Work and Pensions. Administers Universal Credit and other benefits; produces immigration-status disaggregated UC statistics from Habitual Residence Test records.

ECAT — European Convention on Action Against Trafficking. Council of Europe trafficking convention; UK accession independent of ECHR membership.

ECHR — European Convention on Human Rights. Council of Europe treaty incorporated into UK law via the Human Rights Act 1998.

EUSS — EU Settlement Scheme. Post-Brexit residency scheme for EU/EEA citizens resident in the UK before 31 December 2020.

FNO — Foreign National Offender. Used in Home Office data on returns of foreign nationals convicted of criminal offences in the UK.

HMRC — His Majesty's Revenue and Customs. UK tax authority; PAYE Real-Time Information data underpins linked migration-fiscal analysis.

HRT — Habitual Residence Test. Test administered to determine eligibility for benefits including Universal Credit; used by DWP as basis for status disaggregation.

IHS — Immigration Health Surcharge. Annual fee paid by visa holders, currently £1,035 for most adults, ringfenced for NHS funding.

ILR — Indefinite Leave to Remain. UK permanent residency status; previously available after 5 years on most routes, being extended to 10 years for new applicants under "Earned Settlement."

IPPR — Institute for Public Policy Research. Centre-left think tank engaged in migration policy.

ISC — Immigration Skills Charge. Levy on employers sponsoring overseas workers; ringfenced for domestic skills funding.

JCWI — Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. UK migration rights organisation.

KCL — King's College London. University; Bouke Klein Teeselink's October 2025 study of AI labour-market effects is a key reference.

LFS — Labour Force Survey. ONS quarterly survey; primary source for employment data.

LMEG — Labour Market Evidence Group. Body established by May 2025 Immigration White Paper to coordinate migration policy with skills and industrial strategy.

MAC — Migration Advisory Committee. Independent advisory body on migration policy; December 2025 Fiscal Impact of Immigration report is a key reference.

MEL — Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning. Framework for tracking policy outcomes.

NAO — National Audit Office. Independent public spending watchdog; May 2025 briefing on asylum accommodation contracts is a key reference.

NRPF — No Recourse to Public Funds. Visa condition preventing access to most welfare benefits and homelessness support; applies to most non-settled visa holders.

OBR — Office for Budget Responsibility. Independent fiscal watchdog; produces long-term fiscal sustainability modelling including migration projections.

ONS — Office for National Statistics. UK national statistical institute; produces migration estimates, population projections, and labour market data.

RQF — Regulated Qualifications Framework. UK qualifications level system; RQF Level 6 is graduate level. May 2025 White Paper raised Skilled Worker threshold to RQF 6.

SOC — Standard Occupational Classification. ONS occupation coding; used for visa-route eligibility determinations.

TSL — Temporary Shortage List. New mechanism replacing the Immigration Salary List; allows occupational flexibility below RQF 6 with workforce strategy requirements.

TUC — Trades Union Congress. Federation of UK trade unions; engaged in migration policy through worker-rights and wage-impact framing.

UC — Universal Credit. UK working-age welfare benefit; principal vehicle for benefit payments to working-age population.

UNHCR — UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Coordinates international refugee response and resettlement.

Earned Settlement — Labour-government framework for ILR qualifying period extension and contribution-based settlement criteria. Consultation completed 2025; finalised policy due autumn 2026.

Refugee Convention (1951) — UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Defines who is a refugee and what protections they are entitled to. UK is a signatory; obligations exist independently of ECHR.

Earned vs Provisional Settlement — Conceptual distinction between ILR with conditional rights vs full ILR. Used in some policy proposals (Earned Settlement is current Labour policy; Provisional Settlement is a hypothetical intermediate layer).

Notes on Framing and Evidence Confidence

This document is evidence-led but fiscally framed in Parts I-IV.

Parts I-IV privilege fiscal-balance analysis because that is where published data is densest. This is a legitimate analytical frame but should not be confused with neutrality. The fiscal framing produces specific weightings — it foregrounds contribution and welfare cost, while backgrounding cohesion outcomes, protection obligations, demographic dynamics, and labour-market change.

Part VI provides seven parallel framing articles that select and weight the same evidence differently. Reading the master alongside Part VI gives a more balanced view than reading Parts I-V alone.

The party briefings in Part IV are deliberately directional.

Each briefing is written from inside one party's worldview to make the strongest version of that party's case. They are not neutral comparative analyses. The structural framing (factual base, options space, deliverability concerns) is broadly consistent across briefings, but the evaluative framing is party-specific.

Reader notes flagging this appear at the start of Part IV and Part VI.

Source confidence labels.

For policy options and modelled estimates in Part II, the following confidence labels apply:

• [Source] — directly from official or peer-reviewed publication
• [Workbook calculation] — derived from source figures via published methodology
• [Policy estimate] — plausible but model-dependent; assumes specific behavioural responses
• [Speculative] — illustrative only; substantial uncertainty

Most options in the menu involve at least one estimate at the policy-estimate or speculative level. The asylum-procurement evidence base is the most robust; the lifetime fiscal projections by route are modelled; the post-ILR continuation projections are speculative.

Data gaps that affect analysis.

The principal data gaps are:

1. Post-ILR fiscal continuation. No publication tracks lifetime contribution after settlement. MAC modelling extrapolates from pre-ILR earnings trajectories; this is the single largest uncertainty in lifetime fiscal modelling.

2. DWP UC by visa route. Currently aggregated to nationality and status; visa route disaggregation is "under investigation." The Migration Fiscal Ledger proposal addresses this gap.

3. Religion in administrative data. Not collected in welfare or tax data. Cohesion analyses rely on Census 2021 religion data combined with administrative migration data; precise religion-by-route analysis is not possible.

4. Cohesion outcome measurement. No equivalent to MAC fiscal modelling for cohesion outcomes. 2016 Casey Review remains the most comprehensive UK cohesion analysis but is now nine years old.

5. AI labour-market projection. Robotics maturity in low-paid sectors is contested; estimates range from substantial automation by 2030 to persistence into the 2040s. Policy-relevant uncertainty is substantial.

These gaps are flagged in the relevant analytical sections.

This part sets out the available policy options as a structured menu, with each option in identical eight-part format: what it does, benefits, negatives, cost to implement, annual saving or revenue, legal exposure, deliverability, evidence quality. Three illustrative packages show how options combine into coherent programmes with different centres of gravity.

The options are not mutually exclusive. They can be combined, sequenced, or rejected. Some pairs are complementary. The document does not recommend; it lays out the menu so a government, party, or analyst can choose.

Three additional options emerge from the AI framing in Part V.4 (AI-aware sectoral workforce planning, productivity-displacement linked migration policy, AI transition fund linked to migration policy). Those are described in Part V.4 rather than repeated here.

UK Migration Policy: Data and Options Menu for Government Decision

Date: May 2026 Status: Reference document. Public-source data only. No recommendation. Each option presented in identical structure so government can compare and choose.

How to use this document

Part One sets out the data — what the UK already does, what it costs, what migrants pay in, what they receive, and what the cohort breakdowns show. It is descriptive only. It does not argue for any policy direction.

Part Two sets out fourteen discrete policy options. Each option is presented in the same eight-part structure:

1. What it does 2. Benefits 3. Negatives 4. Cost to implement 5. Annual saving or revenue 6. Legal exposure 7. Deliverability 8. Evidence quality

The options are not mutually exclusive. They can be combined, sequenced, or rejected. Some pairs are complementary (e.g. earned settlement + integration investment); some are alternatives (prospective conditional status vs retrospective ILR restriction).

Part Three sets out three composite packages a government could assemble from the menu, and the trade-offs between them. This is presented as illustrative combinations, not recommendations.

Part Four sets out remaining data gaps and the FOIs or legislative changes that would close them.

PART ONE: THE DATA

1. The current restriction architecture

Approximately 3.6 million people held visas with No Recourse to Public Funds at the end of 2024 (House of Commons Library briefing CBP-9790). NRPF excludes mainstream means-tested benefits including Universal Credit, Housing Benefit, Council Tax Reduction, Child Benefit, and homelessness assistance under the main duty. NRPF has been a standard visa condition since 1980. Change of Conditions applications: 65-73% successful in recent periods.

Categories with full or near-full benefit access: British and Irish citizens; Indefinite Leave to Remain holders; people with refugee status or humanitarian protection; EU citizens with EU Settled Status; specific exempt categories (e.g. modern slavery victims with positive conclusive grounds).

2. Universal Credit by immigration status (DWP, January 2026)

Total UC claimants: 8.4 million. By immigration status (January 2026, provisional):

Status	Share of UC
CTA — UK, Ireland, Right of Abode	84.5%
EU Settlement Scheme	9.0%
Humanitarian	0.6%
Refugee	1.6%
Indefinite Leave to Remain, not EUSS	2.6%
Limited Leave to Remain, not EUSS, including family reunion	0.9%
Other	0.4%
No immigration status recorded on digital systems	0.3%

DWP states that 99.9% of people in the CTA group were UK citizens. This table is an immigration-status breakdown, not a nationality table and not a visa-route breakdown.

Status	Share of UC	Approximate count
EU Settlement Scheme	9.7%	~770,000
Indefinite Leave to Remain (non-EUSS)	2.7%	~218,000
Refugee	1.5%	~119,000
Limited Leave to Remain	1.0%	~79,000
Humanitarian protection	0.7%	~55,000

• EU Settlement Scheme: 46.5%
• Indefinite Leave to Remain: 32.5%
• Limited Leave to Remain: 31.8%
• Refugees: 26.5%
• Overall UC claimant rate: 32.0%

Aggregate cost (DWP): £15.1 billion paid in UC to foreign-national households between January 2024 and June 2025 (approximately 18 months). £24.79 billion total to non-UK/Irish households between March 2022 and March 2025.

Habitual Residence Test (year ending September 2025): 821,600 applications; 89.4% pass rate (734,200 passes). Approximately 14,000 foreign nationals becoming UC-eligible per week.

3. Earnings and Income Tax by visa route (HMRC and Home Office, 2023-24)

Source: matched PAYE Real Time Information data, 93% match rate across approximately 1 million visa records, May 2025 publication.

Route	Main applicant	Dependant
Skilled Worker	£56,600	£30,200
Health & Care Worker	£30,900	£22,100
Senior or Specialist Worker (GBM)	£47,900	—
Family entry clearance	£20,200	—
Family extension of stay	£21,300	—

UK comparator: full-time employee median earnings approximately £35,000 (ONS ASHE 2023-24).

Skilled Worker median earnings by nationality: US £112,100; French £77,300; Indian £58,000.

Health & Care Worker median earnings by nationality: Filipino £35,500; Indian £32,000; Ghanaian £27,700.

Skilled Worker PAYE proportions by nationality: Pakistani 85%; French 80%; South African 79%.

• Family entry clearance: £107m total / £1,500 median
• Family extension of stay: £421m total / £1,800 median

4. Lifetime fiscal contribution by route (MAC, December 2025)

Net lifetime fiscal contribution per person, 2022/23 cohort, present value:

Route	Per-person	Whole-cohort
Skilled Worker main (excl Health & Care)	+£689,000	+£47.7bn
Health & Care Worker main	+£54,000	+£5.5bn
Skilled Worker dependant	+£3,000	+£0.1bn
Health & Care Worker dependant	-£67,000	-£3.3bn
Family partner	-£109,000	-£5.6bn

These are modelled lifetime PVs using HMRC PAYE RTI data plus Family Resources Survey. Assumptions matter and post-ILR continuation is partially modelled.

• UK resident adult average: +£3,400
• UK resident children: -£14,900

5. Lifetime contribution by age and earnings (OBR, 2024)

Migrant arriving age 25, until pension age:

• 30% above UK average wage: +£925,000
• UK average wage: +£500,000
• Half UK average wage: -£150,000

CPS analysis: break-even age at average wage approximately 46.

6. Per-migrant immigration system charges

• Visa fees (cumulative): ~£1,900 per migrant
• Immigration Health Surcharge (cumulative): ~£2,600 per migrant
• Employer Immigration Skills Charge: ~£800 per migrant
• IHS rates 2026: £1,035/year adults, £776/year students/dependants/children
• IHS revenue 2023-24: £1.7bn+
• Cumulative IHS revenue 2015-2024: ~£6.9bn
• Combined immigration income (OBR forecast): ~£4.1bn/year

7. Asylum costs (Home Office annual report 2024-25; NAO May 2025 briefing)

• Total asylum support spend 2024-25: £4.0 billion
• Hotel accommodation: £2.1 billion (£5.77m per day)
• Down from £4.7bn total / £3.0bn hotels in 2023-24
• Hotels: ~£170 per person per day
• Dispersal accommodation: ~£27 per person per day
• 6× cost differential

• Original 2019-2029 estimate: £4.5bn
• Current expected total: £15.3bn (3.4× original)
• Hotel accommodation: 76% of 2024/25 contract costs while housing 35% of people in asylum accommodation (Home Affairs Committee)
• Three accommodation suppliers: £383m total reported profit Sept 2019 – Aug 2024 (5 years), 7% average margin (NAO May 2025, supplier-reported and unaudited)

• Asylum applications: 82,100 (relating to 100,600 individuals)
• Initial decisions: 135,151 (up 56%)
• Grants: 54,887 (up 35%); grant rate 42%
• Small boat arrivals: 41,262 (up 13%)
• People in asylum support (June 2025): 106,000

8. Returns and removals (year ending December 2025)

• Total returns: ~38,000
• Enforced returns: 9,914 (up 21%)
• Voluntary returns: ~11,900
• Cost per enforced return: £48,800
• Cost per voluntary return: £4,300
• Returns agreements with ~18 countries

9. Settlement population

• Year ending December 2025: 146,000 ILR grants (down 10%)
• Annual range 2022-2025: 120,000-160,000
• Home Office projection (pre-Earned Settlement): ~1.6m ILR grants 2026-2030
• Approximately 2.2m temporary visa holders at end-2024 on path to settlement

10. NRPF cost-shifting to local authorities (NRPF Connect 2024-25)

• Total: £93.7m
• Households: 5,724
• Greater London: £51.4m / 2,799 households (54% of total)
• South East: £10.6m / 624 households
• East Midlands: £9.4m / 437 households

11. What the data does and does not show

• Earnings by visa route × nationality × industry × occupation
• Income Tax liabilities by route
• Lifetime fiscal contribution by route (MAC modelled)
• Asylum applications, grants, returns by nationality
• UC claimants by immigration status × ethnicity × age × gender × household × region
• Census religion at constituency level
• Historic Income Tax/NICs by EEA/non-EEA (HMRC, to 2018-19)

• Post-ILR fiscal continuation (the visa-data linkage ends at ILR grant)
• Country-of-nationality breakdowns of UC claimants (DWP states "under investigation")
• Religion in welfare or tax administrative data (not collected)
• Council-by-council NRPF figures
• Constituency × immigration status crosstab (data exists, not pre-built)
• Visa overstayer current numbers
• Costed ECHR or Refugee Convention withdrawal model

PART TWO: THE OPTIONS

Option 1: Mandatory Migration Fiscal Ledger

What it does

Legislates for annual Home Office, HMRC, and DWP joint publication of a comprehensive fiscal ledger by visa route and settlement status. Cuts: route × status × year of arrival × years since ILR × age band × region × household composition × industry × earnings band, against tax contributions, immigration system charges, UC, housing element, Child Benefit, Council Tax Reduction, disability benefits where legally publishable, and outcome variables (employment rate, earnings, exit/settlement/citizenship).

Benefits

• Ends the asymmetry where contribution data and benefit data are published separately. Government and Parliament currently work from different cohort definitions on each side of the ledger.
• Enables every subsequent policy option to be designed on measured data rather than estimates.
• Reduces FOI workload across departments.
• Builds public trust through transparency.
• Makes future fiscal projections (Treasury, OBR, IFS) more reliable.

Negatives

• Disclosure thresholds may force suppression of small cells (rare nationality × small region combinations).
• Creates a politically charged annual publication that will be used by all sides of the debate; government should expect each release to generate news cycles.
• Risk of reductive interpretations ("nationality X costs £Y") being drawn from data not designed for that question.
• Religion is not in administrative data; pressure to add it would create new privacy and legal issues.

Cost to implement

Low to moderate. The data integration mostly already exists internally. Annualised cost: £5-15m for cross-departmental statistical infrastructure plus ongoing publication. ONS, HMRC and DWP already have most of the pipework.

Annual saving or revenue

Indirect. No direct fiscal saving from the ledger itself. Savings come from better-targeted subsequent policies.

Legal exposure

Low. Statistical disclosure controls already established. GDPR-compatible if aggregated correctly. No vested-rights issues.

Deliverability

High. Within existing legislative competence. Can be done by amendment to Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 or by Cabinet Office direction.

Evidence quality

Strong. Methodology already exists in the May 2025 HMRC/Home Office linked publication; this option extends and institutionalises it.

Option 2: Asylum accommodation procurement reform

What it does

Imposes open-book contracting with full audit access on all asylum accommodation contracts. Caps margins at a published rate (e.g. 8-10% return on capital). Creates automatic excess-profit clawback. Breaks regional dependency on the three current large suppliers by sub-regional re-tendering. Builds cheaper contingency capacity (state-owned or local authority-led) so hotels become last resort.

Benefits

• Direct attack on the largest documented cost overrun in the migration system. Hotels at £170/person/day vs dispersal at £27/person/day; £383m total supplier profit over 5 years at 7% average margin (NAO May 2025).
• The unit-cost differential is documented; the legal exposure is low because it's a procurement question, not a migration question.
• Cross-partisan political viability: the current government has already moved on hotel reduction, opposition parties have campaigned on it.
• Reduces daily political toxicity of the asylum system, which has wider effects on cohesion and government bandwidth.
• Frees fiscal capacity for integration investment if Option 8 is pursued.

Negatives

• Provider response: existing contracts run to 2029. Renegotiation may trigger litigation or service disruption.
• State-owned dispersal infrastructure carries safeguarding, public order, and local authority resistance risks if poorly designed.
• Local authorities have differential capacity to participate; some will resist regardless of funding.
• Capping margins below provider expectations may cause exit, narrowing market further.

Cost to implement

£200-500m one-off for renegotiation, transition, and contingency capacity build. Some of this is recoverable through subsequent savings within 12-18 months.

Annual saving or revenue

Order-of-magnitude estimate: £1.0-1.5bn annually achievable within 24 months if hotel dependency is reduced from current 30% to ~10% of asylum accommodation. NAO estimated £15.3bn over 10 years on current trajectory; halving that is £7-8bn over the contract period.

Legal exposure

Moderate. Procurement law (Procurement Act 2023) and contract law constrain unilateral renegotiation. But the contracts have published break clauses and the data on cost overrun is sufficient to justify use of public-interest provisions. Lower legal risk than any other major option in this menu.

Deliverability

High. Most action through existing executive procurement powers and the Home Office's contract-management capacity. Some elements (profit clawback as standard) may need primary legislation or new contractual frameworks.

Evidence quality

Strong. NAO reporting unusually clean; Home Affairs Committee findings consistent; provider profit figures published.

Option 3: Prospective conditional settlement status (replaces or supplements full Earned Settlement)

What it does

Creates a new immigration status — provisional or conditional settlement — that sits between Limited Leave and ILR. People reaching the settlement qualifying period enter this status with limited benefit access (e.g. contributory benefits only, restricted means-tested access) for a defined further period. Full ILR with full benefit access requires demonstration of contribution, lawful compliance, English language, and integration participation during the conditional period.

Benefits

• Solves the legal exposure problem with restricting existing ILR holders. Because the new status is prospective, it doesn't touch vested rights.
• Allows route-sensitive design: high-earning Skilled Workers can have a short or absent conditional period; low-earning routes can have a longer one.
• Aligns with the contribution principle that polls well across political divides.
• Maintains the fiscal saving of delaying full benefit access without the political and legal trauma of taking it from current ILR holders.
• Reduces incentive for churn (people quitting work to claim benefits at the moment of settlement).

Negatives

• Adds complexity to the immigration system, which is already criticised for being baroque.
• Creates a new "limbo" category that may be challenged on cohesion or community grounds.
• Risk of ratchet: future governments tighten conditional-period rules, pushing people in this status further from secure residence.
• Administrative cost: new status, new caseworking, new appeals.
• May not save as much as full Earned Settlement extension if the conditional period is short.

Cost to implement

£100-300m setup over two years. Ongoing administrative cost: £30-80m/year (caseworking, IT systems).

Annual saving or revenue

Order-of-magnitude estimate: £1.5-2.5bn/year in steady state from delayed full benefit access, depending on length of conditional period and design of access tiering. Lower than Option 4 (full Earned Settlement extension to 10 years) but legally cleaner.

Legal exposure

Moderate. Article 8 ECHR considerations on family life. Article 14 if conditional period is differentiated by route in ways that map onto protected characteristics. But fundamentally lower exposure than retrospective restriction.

Deliverability

High. Through Immigration Rules and primary legislation for the new status itself. Most provisions can be in regulations.

Evidence quality

Moderate. The fiscal saving is modelled, not measured; depends on assumptions about take-up rates of the conditional status and behavioural response.

Option 4: Earned Settlement extension (5 to 10 years standard qualifying period)

What it does

The currently-implemented policy, partially rolled out from April 2026. Standard qualifying period for ILR extended from 5 to 10 years for most work routes. "Earned settlement" model allows reduction (typically to 6 years) for high-contribution applicants. Family members of British citizens retain 5-year route. EU Settled Status holders protected.

Benefits

• Delays full benefit eligibility for the affected cohort, deferring fiscal exposure.
• Already has Home Office published behavioural assumption: 10-20% reduction in affected inflows.
• Generates additional visa renewal fees (~£1,900 cumulative per migrant) and IHS (~£2,600 cumulative per migrant) over the longer period.
• Aligns with the implementation already underway, so no additional reform pain.

Negatives

• Risk of deterring high-contribution applicants. MAC notes 72% of fiscal gain from Skilled Worker (excl H&C) main applicants comes from top 30% of earners. If Earned Settlement deters this group disproportionately, net fiscal effect could be smaller than expected or negative.
• Creates a 10-year period of insecure status with employer dependency. Sponsoring a Skilled Worker for 10 years estimated at £36,987-£45,811 cost to employer.
• Mandatory earnings threshold (>£12,570/year) effectively prohibits adult dependants not working (e.g. due to childcare) from settling.
• Petition with 265,000+ signatures triggered Westminster Hall debate; ongoing political contention.
• Article 8 ECHR challenges on retroactive application have already begun.

Cost to implement

Largely sunk; partial implementation already in flight. Marginal additional cost: £20-50m for caseworking and IT.

Annual saving or revenue

Order-of-magnitude estimate (this document's own calculation): £2-3bn/year benefit exposure deferred across the affected cohort, partially offset by attrition. No published Treasury costing.

Legal exposure

Moderate. Active litigation on retroactive application. Article 8 ECHR. EU Settled Status protections constrain.

Deliverability

High; partially implemented. Subject to ongoing judicial review challenges.

Evidence quality

Moderate. Behavioural assumption (10-20% reduction) is internal Home Office estimate, not empirical finding. Within academic plausibility range but at upper end.

Option 5: Targeted ILR-holder benefit restriction (high-risk, high-saving)

What it does

Primary legislation restricting welfare access for existing ILR holders, targeted at cohorts with documented net-negative lifetime fiscal contribution (e.g. Family partner route, Health & Care dependants). Uses MAC route data to define the targeted cohorts. Excludes Skilled Worker main applicants, public-service workers with strong employment record, refugees, children, domestic abuse victims.

Benefits

• Highest direct fiscal saving in the menu: £2-6bn/year if the affected cohort overlaps with the ~218,000 ILR holders currently claiming UC.
• Targets identifiable net-negative cohorts rather than blanket restriction.
• Generates significant ongoing welfare savings.

Negatives

• Highest legal exposure of any option: Article 14 ECHR (discrimination), ILO Convention 118, Article 1 of Protocol 1 ECHR (vested property rights), Article 8 family life. Multiple compounding challenges.
• ILR is a vested right; restriction post-grant breaks the implicit contract under which people entered the immigration system.
• The MAC -£109,000 figure is a modelled lifetime PV, not a measured fiscal balance for individuals. Using a population-level statistic to determine individual benefit access is challengeable.
• Community impact: many in target cohorts are spouses of British citizens or parents of British children. Restricting their access raises hardship for British citizens.
• Cost-shifting to local authorities (Section 17 Children Act, homelessness duties) likely to be substantial — could partly cancel central saving.
• Reputational and diplomatic exposure on bilateral relationships with countries whose nationals are disproportionately affected.
• Sets a precedent that ILR is conditional and revocable in fiscal terms, which could reduce future uptake of UK migration routes.

Cost to implement

£50-150m for caseworking, IT, and legal infrastructure. Litigation cost unknown; potentially £100-500m over five years if challenged at scale.

Annual saving or revenue

Order-of-magnitude estimate: £2-6bn/year gross. Net of cost-shifting to local authorities: probably £1-4bn/year. Net of legal costs: lower still.

Legal exposure

Very high. The single highest-exposure option in this menu.

Deliverability

Low without primary legislation, ECHR navigation, and political capital sufficient to weather sustained litigation. Implementable but at significant cost.

Evidence quality

Mixed. The aggregate UC-by-status figures are solid (DWP). The MAC route-level figures are modelled lifetime PVs. The combination of the two to define a target cohort is analytically defensible but not measured at individual level.

Option 6: Tighten No Recourse to Public Funds

What it does

Restricts the existing Change of Conditions process by which NRPF holders can have the condition lifted. Tightens guidance, raises evidence thresholds, narrows exempt categories.

Benefits

• Operates within existing framework; no new status required.
• Reduces the pathway by which temporary migrants currently access mainstream benefits when in hardship.
• Politically aligned with existing direction of policy travel.

Negatives

• Marginal direct saving: most affected categories already cannot claim.
• Cost-shifting to local authorities is the main net effect. NRPF Connect data shows £93.7m local authority cost in 2024-25 across 5,724 households; tightening Change of Conditions would increase this.
• High Court ruling November 2024 on Change of Conditions processing times indicates active judicial scrutiny.
• Article 3 ECHR (destitution); Article 8 (family life); Children Act 1989 statutory duties; UN Convention on Rights of the Child.
• Evidence base for actual fiscal saving is weak.

Cost to implement

Low. Within executive guidance. £10-30m administrative.

Annual saving or revenue

Marginal central-government saving of £100-300m; cost-shift to local authorities of £50-150m. Net public-sector saving probably £50-150m/year.

Legal exposure

High. Active litigation; recent adverse ruling.

Deliverability

Medium. Within existing immigration rules but with significant litigation risk.

Evidence quality

Weak for fiscal effect. Strong for legal exposure.

Option 7: Refugee status restriction ("core protection" model)

What it does

The currently-implemented policy from 2 March 2026. New grants of refugee status or humanitarian protection limited to 30-month initial leave with reviews every 30 months. Proposed 20-year baseline path to settlement. Pre-March 2026 grants retain previous 5-year + ILR pathway.

Benefits

• Reduces long-term fiscal exposure for new refugee cohort.
• Aligns UK with several European systems that have moved to time-limited refugee status.
• Defers settlement-linked benefit access.

Negatives

• Creates instability for refugees in employment and integration. Insecure status reduces employer willingness to hire and reduces refugee willingness to invest in long-term housing, training, family planning.
• Article 23 and 24 of Refugee Convention require equal treatment of refugees with citizens in public relief and social security; tension exists even within current implementation.
• Article 3 and 8 ECHR considerations.
• Refugee employment rates are already low (26.5% on UC; 56% of working-age asylum arrivals overall vs 75% UK-born); insecurity may worsen this.
• Administrative cost of repeated 30-month reviews: substantial.
• 20-year settlement baseline creates a generation of conditionally-resident long-term residents, with cohesion implications.

Cost to implement

£50-150m/year ongoing for review caseworking, IT, and legal.

Annual saving or revenue

Order-of-magnitude estimate: £200-500m/year if benefits delayed by 12 months on average; larger long-run savings from 20-year settlement path but no published modelling. Likely partly offset by reduced refugee employment rates from status insecurity.

Legal exposure

Very high. Refugee Convention Articles 23, 24. ECHR Articles 3, 8. UNCRC. Active litigation expected.

Deliverability

30-month model implemented through Immigration Rules. 20-year settlement baseline subject to consultation. Beyond current implementation: requires significant treaty navigation.

Evidence quality

Weak for net fiscal effect. The cost-of-review and reduced-employment offsets are likely to be substantial but unmeasured.

Option 8: Contribution test (Danish-model) with mandatory integration funding

What it does

Lower benefit rate for non-citizens not meeting a residence-and-contribution threshold (e.g. lived in UK 7 of last 10 years and worked at least 2.5 years full-time in last 10). Combined with mandatory and funded integration package: intensive English language training, employment programmes, mandatory integration participation, residential dispersal coordination. Exemptions for children, refugees, domestic abuse victims, disability, severe illness, British-citizen children in affected households.

Benefits

• Directly addresses the principle of contribution-based access that polls well across political divides.
• Danish model showed measurable integration outcomes: non-Western employment gap narrowed from 27pp to 18pp 2015-2021; refugee employment after 3 years rose to 43-45%.
• Combines fiscal saving with cohesion outcome rather than choosing between them.
• More legally defensible than blanket restrictions because it operates through universal residence-and-work tests rather than nationality.

Negatives

• The fiscal saving in the menu's other options assumes the integration spending is separate. Including it here means the net saving is much smaller.
• Danish evaluations attribute most integration improvement to the investment, not the benefit cuts. UK without comparable investment will not replicate outcomes.
• Required investment scale: Denmark spent ~1% of GDP on active labour market and integration in peak years. UK equivalent: ~£25-30bn/year sustained. Without this scale of investment, this option becomes Option 5 with extra steps.
• Article 14 ECHR considerations on residence-and-contribution tests; designable around but requires care.
• Local authority capacity to deliver integration programmes is uneven; will need substantial new capacity-building.

Cost to implement

£25-30bn/year sustained at Danish-equivalent scale. Lower-investment versions (£5-10bn/year) possible but with proportionally weaker outcomes.

Annual saving or revenue

£1-3bn/year direct welfare savings. Net of integration spending: substantially negative in early years; potentially positive after 5-10 years if integration outcomes match Danish peak.

Legal exposure

Moderate. Designable within ECHR framework but with care on Article 14 differentiation.

Deliverability

Medium. The benefit-restriction half is straightforward; the integration-investment half requires significant new spending commitment and cross-departmental capacity.

Evidence quality

Strong on Danish outcomes. Moderate on UK transferability (different starting position, different demographic mix, different employment market).

Option 9: Increase Immigration Health Surcharge

What it does

Raises IHS rates above current levels (£1,035/year adults). Doubling would yield approximately £1.7bn additional revenue; smaller increases proportionally less.

Benefits

• Direct revenue.
• Targeted at temporary migrants who have not yet contributed long-term to the NHS through general taxation.
• Politically straightforward.
• No vested-rights issues.

Negatives

• Large families hit hardest (each dependant pays IHS).
• May affect international student recruitment, with knock-on effects on higher education sector finances.
• Cumulative cost over a 10-year sponsored visa now significant; combined with Earned Settlement extension creates substantial financial barrier.
• Limited strategic effect: revenue rather than systemic change.

Cost to implement

Low. Existing collection infrastructure.

Annual saving or revenue

£0.5-2bn/year additional revenue depending on rate increase.

Legal exposure

Low.

Deliverability

High. Through immigration rules and fees regulations.

Evidence quality

Strong on direct revenue effect. Moderate on behavioural responses (deterrence).

Option 10: Tighten existing Habitual Residence Test

What it does

Raises evidence thresholds for HRT. Currently 89.4% pass rate; tightening might reduce to 75-80%.

Benefits

• Operates within existing framework.
• Modest direct saving.
• Reduces gateway by which foreign nationals become UC-eligible (~14,000/week current pass-through).

Negatives

• Errors of exclusion affecting British citizens returning from abroad.
• EU citizens with valid rights may be wrongly excluded (UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement).
• Marginal saving against compliance and litigation cost.

Cost to implement

Low. Existing process.

Annual saving or revenue

£100-300m/year.

Legal exposure

Moderate. EU Withdrawal Agreement protections.

Deliverability

High.

Evidence quality

Weak. Most non-citizens already fail or are excluded by other means.

Option 11: Returns-rate increase and capacity expansion

What it does

Expands detention capacity (currently ~2,200), increases returns operations, expands voluntary returns programme. Negotiates additional bilateral returns agreements with high-volume source countries currently lacking arrangements (Iran, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria).

Benefits

• Voluntary returns at £4,300/person are 11× cheaper than enforced returns at £48,800/person; expanding voluntary programme is high-leverage.
• Reduces visible irregular population.
• Demonstrates rule-of-law operation of immigration system.

Negatives

• The high-volume source countries lacking returns agreements are mostly states the UK cannot negotiate with directly (Iran, Eritrea, Syria) or has security concerns about (Afghanistan).
• Detention expansion has documented welfare and human rights concerns.
• 51% of detention leavers in 2025 released on bail rather than removed; the binding constraint is removability, not detention capacity.
• Rwanda scheme cost-per-person ratio (£200,000 at scale per IPPR modelling) shows offshoring is not a fiscally efficient route.

Cost to implement

£500m-1bn for capacity expansion plus £200-400m/year ongoing.

Annual saving or revenue

Difficult to quantify net of asylum-system savings (each returned person reduces support costs going forward). Order-of-magnitude: £200-600m/year net fiscal effect through reduced asylum support exposure.

Legal exposure

Moderate to high. ECHR Article 3 (refoulement), Article 8 (family life), individual returns challenges.

Deliverability

Medium. Operational expansion possible; bilateral returns agreements with sanctioned/hostile states largely impossible.

Evidence quality

Strong on unit costs. Weak on the binding constraint (removability).

Option 12: Restore HMRC non-UK nationals tax statistics series

What it does

Restores the HMRC publication Income Tax, NICs, Tax Credits and Child Benefit Statistics for non-UK Nationals discontinued after 2018-19, with extension to ILR cohort breakdown.

Benefits

• Closes one of the named data gaps.
• Lower-cost than full Migration Fiscal Ledger (Option 1); achievable as standalone.
• Restores historic time-series continuity.

Negatives

• Less comprehensive than Option 1.
• Without DWP and Home Office linkage, only captures contribution side.

Cost to implement

£2-5m/year.

Annual saving or revenue

None direct.

Legal exposure

Low.

Deliverability

High. HMRC has done it before.

Evidence quality

Strong methodology already exists in archive.

Option 13: Schools and NHS access restriction

What it does

Restricts non-emergency NHS access for foreign nationals beyond IHS-paying categories. Restricts school enrolment for children of irregular migrants.

Benefits

• Removes pull factors associated with public service access.
• Generates IHS-equivalent revenue from currently-uncovered groups.

Negatives

• Schools: Universal access is required under Education Act 1996, UN Convention on Rights of the Child Article 28, ECHR Protocol 1 Article 2. Practically not deliverable at scale.
• NHS: Restricting GP registration creates A&E demand and public health risk (uncontrolled communicable disease exposure). May cost more than it saves.
• Major cohesion and ethical issues with denying schooling to children regardless of parental status.
• Legal exposure across multiple instruments.

Cost to implement

Substantial. Compliance and verification infrastructure needed.

Annual saving or revenue

Net effect likely negative once public health and emergency-care costs are included.

Legal exposure

Very high.

Deliverability

Very low.

Evidence quality

Strong on negative net fiscal effect.

Option 14: ECHR derogation or denunciation

What it does

Either withdraws from the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 58, six months notice) or derogates on specific articles. Removes a major constraint on several other options in this menu.

Benefits

• Removes Article 3, 8, and 14 ECHR exposure on most migration-related restriction options.
• Shifts power balance back to Westminster on contested cases.
• Enables policies (broad ILR-holder restriction, refugee restriction beyond Convention floor) currently constrained.

Negatives

• ECHR is embedded in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement framework. UK denunciation has implications for Northern Ireland's constitutional settlement.
• ECHR is referenced in the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement; UK denunciation would be ground for EU termination of the law-enforcement and judicial-cooperation parts.
• Affects extradition treaties, policing cooperation, intelligence-sharing arrangements.
• Reputational consequences with allied states.
• Refugee Convention obligations remain regardless of ECHR status.
• Domestic Human Rights Act could be repealed instead, achieving most of the same effect without external treaty cascade.

Cost to implement

Difficult to quantify. Direct legal/legislative cost: £50-200m. Indirect costs (lost cooperation, business confidence, treaty cascade) potentially £5-50bn over a decade depending on scope.

Annual saving or revenue

Enables other options' savings. Direct effect: likely net negative after cascade costs.

Legal exposure

n/a (this is the option that removes legal exposure on others).

Deliverability

Low. Politically. Procedurally feasible (six months notice) but constitutionally complex.

Evidence quality

Weak. No serious public fiscal model of trade, policing, business confidence, or treaty cascade effects exists.

PART THREE: ILLUSTRATIVE PACKAGES

These are not recommendations. They are illustrations of how the options can be combined into coherent packages with different political centres of gravity. A government can assemble its own package from the menu.

Package A: Evidence-led, low legal risk, cross-partisan

Components: Options 1 (Migration Fiscal Ledger) + 2 (asylum procurement reform) + 12 (restore HMRC series)

Net annual fiscal effect: £1-1.5bn saving in steady state, mostly from procurement reform.

Legal risk: Very low.

Political coalition: Workable across most parties. Asylum procurement reform has cross-partisan support. Data transparency is hard to oppose explicitly.

Time to effect: 12-24 months.

What it doesn't do: Address the larger structural questions about settlement and benefit access. Defers those decisions to a future government armed with better data.

Package B: Structural reform, moderate legal risk

Components: Options 1 + 2 + 3 (prospective conditional status) + 8 (Danish model with funded integration)

Legal risk: Moderate. Article 14 ECHR considerations on contribution test. Article 8 on conditional settlement.

Political coalition: Centre-left to centre-right. Requires commitment to integration spending which is contentious on the right.

Time to effect: 5-10 years for full benefits.

What it does: Combines fiscal saving with cohesion investment. Most evidence-aligned package given Danish learning.

Package C: Maximum restriction, high legal risk

Components: Options 4 (Earned Settlement) + 5 (targeted ILR restriction) + 7 (refugee restriction) + 14 (ECHR derogation/denunciation)

Net annual fiscal effect: £5-10bn gross saving. Net of cost-shifting, litigation, and treaty-cascade costs: highly uncertain. Could be £2-4bn positive or could be net negative depending on cascade-cost realisation.

Legal risk: Very high. ECHR derogation removes some exposure but creates larger constitutional and treaty exposures.

Political coalition: Right and right-populist. Outside current Conservative or Labour positioning.

Time to effect: 18-36 months for legislative passage; longer for full operational effect.

What it does: Maximises direct welfare and asylum savings. Accepts substantial collateral cost.

PART FOUR: REMAINING DATA GAPS AND HOW TO CLOSE THEM

Three FOI requests that would close the most consequential gaps

FOI 1 — Joint Home Office and HMRC. Request extension of Sponsored Work and Family Visa earnings, employment and Income Tax publication to follow cohorts post-ILR grant. Most useful because it builds on existing methodology and matched-data infrastructure.

FOI 2 — DWP. Request specific Stat-Xplore custom crosstabs of UC by immigration status × constituency × household type × employment status × years since status grant. Targeted at constituency-level analysis nobody has currently done.

FOI 3 — HMRC. Request restoration of Income Tax, NICs, Tax Credits and Child Benefit Statistics for non-UK Nationals series with extension to ILR cohort breakdown. Smaller ask than creating new dataset; restores discontinued series.

Legislative routes (for a government)

Option 1 in this menu (Migration Fiscal Ledger) achieves more than any FOI sequence and could be done as part of a Statistics Bill or by Cabinet Office direction.

Genuine remaining gaps even with data closure

Religion in administrative data is a structural absence (not collected). Closing it would require new data collection, with significant privacy and legal issues. This document does not recommend closing it.

ECHR or Refugee Convention withdrawal cost modelling is a legal-economic exercise that has not been done in public form. Should not proceed with Option 14 without it.

Migration elasticity to UK policy specifically: no recent UK-specific quantification. Hatton (2009) is best published reference but dated.

Conventions

On figures: Where official, stated as such. Where modelled, the modelling body is named. Where this document calculates from multiple sources, this is stated.

On the order-of-magnitude estimates in Part Two: These combine cohort projections × take-up rates × population-average support figures. Each input has wide uncertainty. Treasury has not published costings for most of these options. The estimates are illustrative ranges, not Treasury figures.

On framing: This document presents fiscal-balance analysis because that is what the data supports and what most policy options in the public debate are designed around. Other framings exist: community cohesion, family integrity, refugee protection, demographic balance, cultural change, national contribution beyond fiscal terms. Each option in this menu would be evaluated differently under a different framing. The document does not adjudicate between framings.

What this document does not do: Recommend any policy. Adjudicate between contested estimates. Predict outcomes beyond cited modelling. Replace proper fiscal modelling by Treasury, IFS, Resolution Foundation, or commissioned academic work.

End of document.

Part V — Master Comparative Overview

This part maps the political landscape on migration policy as it stands in May 2026. It documents where parties agree (more than commonly recognised), where they sharply differ (the ten genuine fault lines), the gravitational pulls reshaping the debate, and three scenarios for the next two years.

It explains which parties were given separate briefings in Part IV and why some were not. It includes the full party-by-party comparison tables.

Overview and Comparative Tables

UK Migration Policy: Party-by-Party Briefings — Overview

Map of the political landscape and reading guide

Date: May 2026 Purpose: Companion overview to nine separate party briefings. Maps the UK political landscape on migration policy as it stands in May 2026, after the local and devolved elections of 7-8 May. Notes parties not given separate briefings and explains why.

How the briefing set is organised

Nine separate briefings have been produced, each written from inside the worldview of the party in question. Each takes the party's stated values and political framework seriously and uses the available data to reinforce, sharpen, and stress-test the party's positions. The briefings are not neutral analyses; they are written for the party in question.

Reading any single briefing in isolation gives you a clear picture of how that party would approach migration policy on its own terms. Reading the full set gives you the comparative picture: where parties agree, where they sharply differ, and where the real political fault lines lie.

The briefings included:

• Six UK-wide parties with substantial migration platforms: Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrats, Green, Reform UK, Restore Britain
• Three regional parties with distinctive migration positions tied to devolved or specific regional contexts: Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, Democratic Unionist Party

The following parties have not been given separate briefings:

• Sinn Féin — Has been largely silent on UK-wide migration policy, focusing on Republic-of-Ireland-aligned positions and Northern Ireland constitutional questions. Migration policy is not a primary engagement area.
• SDLP — Similar limited engagement with UK-wide migration policy.
• Alliance Party (NI) — Holds a liberal position broadly aligned with Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dem briefing largely covers their analytical position; specific Alliance briefing would replicate most material.
• Ulster Unionist Party — Holds a moderate unionist position closer to the DUP than to other parties, with similar Belfast/Good Friday Agreement considerations. The DUP briefing largely covers shared ground; UUP-specific briefing would mostly replicate.
• Workers Party of Britain (Galloway) — Has migration platform but limited polling support (typically <2%) and limited substantive policy depth on specific migration mechanisms. Position broadly aligned with anti-immigration framing without the analytical specification of Reform.
• Independents and very small parties — Various positions, no consistent platform across them.

If the political landscape changes substantially before 2029 (for instance, if a new party emerges with substantial polling support), additional briefings may be warranted.

The political landscape, May 2026

The 7-8 May 2026 local and devolved elections produced significant shifts that affect migration policy direction.

Reform UK gained more than 1,300 council seats, entered Holyrood and the Senedd, and surged past 30% in former Labour strongholds. Polling consistently puts Reform ahead of Labour and Conservative parties at UK level.

The Greens won 586 seats, tripled membership under Polanski's leadership, and overtook Labour and Conservatives in some polls.

The SNP retained largest-party status in Scotland but without majority (58 MSPs); pro-independence majority exists with Greens.

Plaid Cymru won historic Senedd result alongside SNP, opening triangular pro-independence framework with Sinn Féin in NI.

Labour suffered historic local losses — 1,400+ seats, with Starmer refusing to resign but facing pressure from both flanks.

The Conservative position has hardened sharply under Badenoch since November 2024, with Borders Plan, ECHR withdrawal commitment, and 150,000 deportation target.

Restore Britain converted from pressure group to party in February 2026, polling 8-9%.

The Lib Dems lost less ground than Labour at the local elections, holding their position as a smaller but coherent rights-and-coordination voice.

The political force is now distributed across at least seven parties at UK or major-region level rather than the previous two-party domination. Migration policy positions have correspondingly diversified.

Where the parties agree

Cross-party convergence is real and worth flagging — these are the most deliverable items in the policy space because they cross partisan lines:

Item	Labour	Cons	LibDem	Green	Reform	Restore	SNP	Plaid	DUP
End asylum hotels	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes (different model)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Asylum procurement reform	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Implicit	Implicit	Yes	Yes	Yes
Voluntary returns expansion	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes (where chosen)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
FNO removal expansion	Yes	Yes	Yes	Limited	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Smuggling-network action	Yes	Yes	Yes	Limited framing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Anti-trafficking framework	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Skilled-migration economic value	Yes	Limited	Yes	Yes	Limited	No	Yes	Yes	Yes

Asylum procurement reform is the strongest cross-party item. The NAO £15.3bn contract overrun and £383m total supplier profit (Sept 2019 – Aug 2024) at 7% margin are documented. Open-book contracting, profit caps, and provider re-tendering have support from every major party except possibly Restore Britain (which has not engaged with this question directly).

Voluntary returns at the cost differential (£4,300 vs £48,800 enforced) is fiscally compelling regardless of values position.

Where the parties sharply differ

Ten fault lines structure the UK migration debate:

Fault line	Sharply against	Sharply for
ECHR withdrawal	Labour, LibDem, Green, SNP, Plaid	Conservative, Reform, Restore
Retrospective ILR restriction	All except Reform, Restore	Reform, Restore
Numerical caps on legal migration	Labour, LibDem, Green, SNP, Plaid	Conservative, Reform, Restore
Asylum claim ban for new illegal entrants	Labour, LibDem, Green, SNP, Plaid	Conservative, Reform, Restore
Refugee Convention adherence	Labour, LibDem, Green, SNP, Plaid	(implicit denunciation: Reform, Restore)
Family route easing	LibDem, Green, SNP, Plaid	Conservative, Reform, Restore
NRPF abolition	Green	Conservative, Reform, Restore
Integration investment	LibDem, Green	Reform, Restore
Safe legal routes expansion	LibDem, Green, SNP	Reform, Restore
Mass deportation operations	All except Reform, Restore	Reform, Restore

The pattern: Reform and Restore form a clear bloc on the most restrictive positions. Labour and the Conservatives currently sit in different positions but the Conservative trajectory under Badenoch has been towards Reform/Restore positioning. The Greens, Lib Dems, SNP, and Plaid form a clear bloc on the most permissive positions.

The DUP sits across this somewhat awkwardly — moderate on most measures, but with specific NI Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and Common Travel Area considerations that don't map cleanly onto the UK-wide spectrum.

The gravitational pulls

Three movements in the political landscape are reshaping where parties stand:

Reform's gravitational pull on the right. With Reform leading polls and Conservative voters shifting to Reform on the right flank, the Conservative position has hardened sharply. The Borders Plan announced October 2025 and the ECHR withdrawal commitment of March 2026 are responses to the Reform threat. This pull continues; the Conservatives may move further right before the next election.

Green's gravitational pull on the left. With Greens overtaking Labour in some polls and Polanski's tripling of membership, Labour faces a pincer of losing pro-migration voters to Greens and anti-migration voters to Reform. The Lib Dems and Greens together carry the rights-and-coordination position that Labour previously substantially occupied.

The squeezed centre. The civic-nationalist-integrationist position — rights-protective, contribution-based, evidence-led, ECHR-retaining — does not have a clear partisan home. Most British public polling sits closer to this position than to either Reform or Green extremes. But no major party currently champions it cleanly. Labour has moved away from it (30-month refugee reviews, Reform-pressured rhetoric); the Conservatives have moved past it (Borders Plan, ECHR withdrawal); the Lib Dems are too small to vehicle it; the Greens reject it on values; Reform and Restore are well to its right.

The regional dimensions. SNP, Plaid, and Sinn Féin have begun coordinating explicitly on constitutional questions. Migration policy is not the primary axis of this coordination but is affected by it. The Welsh and Scottish demographic case for differentiated migration accommodation has cross-party support within those nations even where unionist parties exist; this gives the regional position weight independent of pro-independence framing.

Three scenarios for the next two years

Scenario A: Labour holds. The current Labour package implements with some hardening. Migration policy remains in evidence-led-with-enforcement mode. Greens grow but don't displace at UK level. Reform peaks below government level. Conservative repositioning continues but does not gain decisive ground. Likelihood: weakening but not eliminated.

Scenario B: Conservative-Reform realignment. A general election (constitutionally due by 2029) produces either a Reform-led government, a Conservative-Reform coalition, or a Conservative government implementing substantially Reform-aligned policies under voter pressure. ECHR withdrawal becomes live. Mass deportation programme becomes operational. Legal architecture rupture begins. Belfast/Good Friday Agreement framework comes under specific pressure. Likelihood: live and growing.

Scenario C: Fragmentation. No party reaches majority. Greens, Lib Dems, Reform, Conservatives, Labour all hold significant Commons strength. Migration policy stalls in coalition negotiation. The status quo holds by default. Possible coalitions: Labour-Lib Dem-Green left bloc; Conservative-Reform-DUP right bloc; or fragmented with no stable government. Likelihood: real possibility given local election fragmentation.

The May 2026 local elections suggest Scenario A is weakening. Scenarios B and C are both live. The data position will not change substantially over this period — no major new releases expected before 2027 — so the political question dominates over the analytical one.

What the data does and does not adjudicate

The same evidence base — the workbook, the MAC December 2025 figures, the HMRC/Home Office linked data, the DWP UC by status data, the NAO asylum contract findings — supports each of these party positions when weighted against the party's particular values.

The evidence:

• Confirms strong fiscal contribution from skilled-migration routes
• Confirms weaker fiscal contribution from family and dependant routes
• Confirms substantial procurement waste in current asylum accommodation
• Confirms voluntary returns are dramatically cheaper than enforced
• Confirms employment-rate variation by immigration status
• Confirms ECHR cascade costs are unmodelled
• Confirms Refugee Convention obligations are independent of ECHR
• Confirms post-ILR fiscal continuation is the main remaining data gap

The evidence does not:

• Tell you what weight to give fiscal balance vs cohesion vs family integrity vs refugee protection
• Tell you whether reciprocity creates moral claims independent of fiscal contribution
• Tell you what level of integration investment a country should fund
• Tell you whether ECHR withdrawal is worth the cascade costs
• Tell you whether net-negative migration is desirable given demographic realities
• Tell you whether route-based or contribution-based or status-based access is more legitimate
• Tell you what Britain owes refugees, or family-route applicants, or long-term residents, or undocumented migrants

These are values questions. Each party's briefing in this set takes its values seriously and shows how the evidence would be deployed to support its direction. Disagreement happens at the values level; the evidence does not adjudicate.

How to use this briefing set

If you support a particular party: Read that party's briefing first, then the comparative report, then the briefings of the parties most opposed to your own to understand their best version. The briefings are designed to make each party's serious case; reading the opposing case helps test your own.

If you are undecided: Read the comparative report first, then the briefings of the parties closest to your values. Each briefing is internally consistent and can be evaluated on its own terms.

If you are a researcher or journalist: Read the data workbook for verification of specific claims, then the descriptive report for narrative walkthrough, then the comparative report for fault-line mapping, then individual briefings for the strongest version of each party's case.

If you are a policymaker: The options menu document remains the primary policymaker resource. The briefings show how the options would be selected differently under different party frameworks.

The complete document set

Eleven documents now constitute this evidence package:

1. the data workbook — Sourced data 2. uk_migration_policy_full_descriptive_report — Narrative walkthrough 3. uk_migration_policy_options_menu — Neutral options menu 4. what_i_would_do — Personal-view document with explicit values 5. six_party_comparative_report — Cross-party comparative 6. the Labour briefing — Labour briefing 7. the Conservative briefing — Conservative briefing 8. the Liberal Democrat briefing — Liberal Democrat briefing 9. the Green briefing — Green Party briefing 10. the Reform UK briefing — Reform UK briefing 11. the Restore Britain briefing — Restore Britain briefing 12. the SNP briefing — SNP briefing 13. the Plaid Cymru briefing — Plaid Cymru briefing 14. the DUP briefing — DUP briefing 15. party_briefings_overview — This document

Together they cover: what's true (workbook), what it means (descriptive report), what could be done (options menu), what I would do (personal view), what each party would do (briefings), how parties compare (comparative report and overview).

Different layers serve different purposes. Take what's useful from each.

End of overview.

Six-Party Comparative Detail

UK Migration Policy: Six-Party Comparative Report

What each party would do, where they agree, where they differ

Date: May 2026 (prepared after 8 May local elections) Status: Comparative analysis. Represents each party's actual stated positions as of May 2026 — fairly, not as caricature. Sourced from current party policy documents, manifestos, and leadership statements.

Author's note

Each section below is written as if briefing the leader of that party on what their party's evidence-based migration package would look like, drawing from the same data set. The aim is to show how the same evidence supports different conclusions when weighted against different values — and to do so without strawmanning anyone.

I have made an effort to present each party's argument as its serious thinkers would, not as its opponents would. That means:

• The Reform position is presented as a contribution-and-control argument, not as racism dressed up.
• The Restore Britain position is presented as a sovereignty-and-demographic argument, not as fascism dressed up. (See specific note about that party's position in Section 6.)
• The Green position is presented as a humanity-and-economic-justice argument, not as fantasy.
• The Lib Dem position is presented as a rights-and-coordination argument, not as evasion.
• Labour and Conservative positions are presented as the actual implemented and proposed policies, not as either's preferred opposition framing.

A reader who finds any party's section uncomfortable should ask whether it's because the position is misrepresented, or because the position is being represented honestly and they disagree with it. Both are legitimate reactions but they are different things.

This document does not say which party is right. It maps the terrain.

1. Labour

Stated position (as governing party, May 2026)

Labour governs migration policy through three frameworks: the May 2025 White Paper Restoring Control over the Immigration System, the December 2025 Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act, and the March 2026 statement of changes implementing 30-month refugee status reviews. Shabana Mahmood at the Home Office (Home Secretary since 5 September 2025, succeeding Yvette Cooper) has rejected numerical caps but committed to "swift" reduction in net migration, with delivery through route-specific tightening rather than headline cuts. The November 2025 Restoring Order paper, the March 2026 statement on 30-month refugee status reviews, and the 10-year ILR baseline are Mahmood-era policy.

Net migration has fallen sharply under Labour — approximately 200,000 in the year ending June 2025, down from 649,000 a year earlier — though the Migration Observatory notes most of this fall reflects measures introduced by the previous government rather than Labour decisions.

What a Labour-aligned package looks like

Asylum procurement reform. Labour has committed to ending hotel accommodation by end of Parliament (2029). The package implements faster: open-book contracting on existing contracts, profit caps on providers, expansion of dispersal capacity through military bases (one already operating with 500-place capacity from January 2026) and local authority partnership models. Targets the £15.3bn projected contract overrun documented by NAO.

Smuggling-gang focus rather than deterrence-of-arrivals focus. The Border Security Command, the France one-in-one-out returns agreement (377 returns to France, 380 admitted to UK between August 2025 and March 2026), the German agreement on boat seizures, Iraq and Serbia transit cooperation. Labour treats this as the alternative to Conservative/Reform deterrence-by-restriction approaches.

Earned Settlement (5-to-10-year qualifying period extension). Currently in implementation, with the Home Secretary stating finalised policy in autumn 2026 and B2 English requirement aligned to 2027. The Home Affairs Committee's March 2026 report flagged adult social care implications: hundreds of thousands of care workers becoming eligible for settled status without changes.

MAC strengthening and evidence-led approach. Labour committed in its manifesto to giving MAC a stronger role; the December 2025 MAC fiscal impact report is part of the resulting evidence base.

Refugee 30-month review cycle. Implemented from March 2026. Recognised refugees receive temporary status renewable every 30 months, with up to 30 years before settlement for those who arrived without authorisation. Migration Observatory and IPPR have characterised this as "near-perpetual state of insecurity"; the government characterises it as deterring opportunistic claims.

No ECHR withdrawal. Labour has explicitly ruled out leaving the Convention.

Constraints on the Labour package

The asylum hotels timeline (2029) is binding the government to a continued cost overrun while it scales replacement capacity. Labour's vote share fell sharply in May 2026 local elections; the political pressure is to harden migration policy further to stem defections to Reform on one side and the Greens on the other. The government's social care reform interacts with care worker visa restrictions — closing overseas recruitment exposes a workforce gap that domestic supply cannot yet fill.

The 30-month refugee review cycle creates a legal exposure under Refugee Convention Articles 23 and 24 that has not yet been tested in court but will be.

What a Labour government would not do

Mass deportation operations of the Reform/Conservative type. ECHR derogation. Retrospective restriction of existing ILR holders. Numerical caps. Withdrawal from the Refugee Convention. Hostile environment expansion of the kind the Greens describe.

2. Conservative

Stated position (as official opposition, May 2026)

The Conservative Borders Plan, set out by Kemi Badenoch from October 2025 onwards, has shifted substantially from the Conservative position in government (2010-2024). The current position includes:

• Total ban on asylum claims for new illegal entrants
• Withdrawal from ECHR, ECAT, and repeal of the Human Rights Act
• Establishment of a "Removals Force" to remove 150,000 illegal immigrants per year
• Deportation of all new illegal arrivals within a week, and all foreign criminals
• End to Immigration Tribunal, Judicial Review, and legal aid for immigration cases
• Returns agreements backed by visa sanctions
• Strict numerical cap on legal migration
• Doubling of ILR qualifying period from 5 to 10 years (predates Labour's similar policy)

Badenoch's March 2026 statement explicitly endorsed ECHR withdrawal, citing inability to deport Rochdale grooming gang convicts under Article 8 as a centrepiece example.

What a Conservative package looks like

Mass returns operation. The Removals Force at £1.6 billion budget with sweeping powers including non-consensual facial recognition. The 150,000/year target is roughly four times current enforced returns. The package draws on US ICE methodology, which Badenoch has cited approvingly.

Legal architecture rupture. ECHR withdrawal under Article 58 (six months' notice). Repeal of the Human Rights Act. Withdrawal from the European Convention Against Trafficking. End of Judicial Review for immigration cases. Domestic rights framework to replace the ECHR (not yet specified).

Total asylum claim block for illegal entrants. All new illegal arrivals deported without claim consideration. This requires a destination — third-country processing arrangements with countries to be negotiated. The Conservative position does not specify these countries.

ILR qualifying period extension. From 5 to 10 years. Badenoch announced this in February 2025, predating Labour's similar policy. Conservative position frames it as protecting the welfare state from the "Boriswave" — the 2022-2024 net migration peak under their own previous government.

Numerical cap on legal migration. Specific level not published. Badenoch has committed to a cap but not to a number.

Cultural/integration framing. Badenoch has explicitly linked immigration restriction to antisemitism prevention, citing immigration "from cultures with a history of hatred against Jews" (March 2026 Jewish News interview). This aligns the Conservative position partly with civic-cohesion concerns but draws criticism for cultural-essentialist framing.

Constraints on the Conservative package

The legal cascade from ECHR withdrawal is unmodelled in any Conservative published document. Belfast/Good Friday Agreement implications, UK-EU TCA law-enforcement cooperation termination, extradition treaty effects, and business confidence consequences are acknowledged by Badenoch's own statement (the "ECHR Commission") but not costed.

The Removals Force capacity question is not resolved — current detention capacity is 2,200; current returns are ~38,000/year of which 9,914 are enforced. 150,000/year is not deliverable without major new infrastructure, agreements with destination countries, and legal authority to detain at scale.

The party is competing with Reform for the same voter base. Reform's position is more radical on most measures (rescinding existing ILR; reviewing five years of asylum grants; abolishing ILR entirely). The Conservative pitch is "tough but deliverable"; the Reform pitch is "tough and we mean it." Polling currently puts Reform ahead.

What a Conservative government would not do

The package generally rules out: pro-migration framing of any kind; safe legal routes expansion beyond very narrow categories (Hong Kong, Ukraine); integration investment of the Danish-model type; coordination-with-EU framework; ECHR retention.

It also formally rules out, though the practical implementation is contested: retrospective restriction of existing ILR holders. Badenoch's position is prospective restriction. Reform's is retrospective.

3. Reform UK

Stated position (May 2026)

Reform UK, after the 8 May 2026 local elections, controls more than 1,300 council seats and has entered Holyrood and the Senedd. Polling has it consistently leading both Labour and Conservatives. The party's positions, primarily articulated by Nigel Farage and home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf, are:

• Abolition of Indefinite Leave to Remain entirely
• Rescission of ILR from existing holders, replaced with five-year visa requiring £60,000 minimum salary
• Review of all asylum claims granted in last five years; revocation of leave to remain for those entering "illegally" or overstaying
• ECHR withdrawal
• "UK Deportation Command" as mass-deportation agency
• Five-year moratorium on low-skilled immigration
• Emergency brake on work and family visas
• Offshore processing of asylum seekers
• New Acute Skills Shortage Visa requiring employer to train one domestic worker per overseas hire
• Increased entrepreneur and investor routes
• Estimated saving claimed: £14.3 billion over a Parliament; £137 billion over policy lifetime

EU Settled Status holders are exempted under the Withdrawal Agreement protections, which Reform acknowledges.

What a Reform package looks like

Mass deportation as primary mechanism. UK Deportation Command operating at scale. Voluntary returns expanded; enforced returns at far higher volume than current. Detention capacity expanded. Removals to third countries pursued.

Existing ILR rescission. All current ILR holders (other than EUSS) lose status and must reapply under the new £60,000 salary visa. The data implication: with the average UK full-time wage at ~£35,000 and the Skilled Worker route median at £56,600, the £60,000 threshold removes the substantial majority of current ILR holders. Reform frames this as restoring contribution-based settlement; critics frame it as breaking the legal certainty under which migrants entered.

Asylum status reopening. Five years of granted asylum claims reviewed. Reform has not specified the criteria or process for the review. The party estimates the savings (£14.3bn / Parliament; £137bn / lifetime) but has not published the cost basis. Detention capacity (2,200 places) versus likely numbers in scope (multiple hundreds of thousands across five years) is unresolved.

Legal rupture. ECHR withdrawal. Refugee Convention engagement uncertain — Reform has not formally proposed denunciation but has proposed actions (the asylum review) that would trigger Article 23/24 violations.

Sectoral immigration. Acute Skills Shortage Visa limited to specified sectors with mandatory domestic-worker training. Investor and entrepreneur routes expanded. Effectively replaces Skilled Worker route entirely.

Constraints on the Reform package

The legal exposure is the highest of any package in this document. Article 1 of Protocol 1 ECHR (vested property rights) on ILR rescission. Article 14 on differential treatment by nationality and route. Article 8 on family separation at scale. Refugee Convention Articles 23, 24, 32, 33 on the asylum review. The package is not deliverable without ECHR withdrawal and would still face Refugee Convention exposure.

The fiscal claim (£14.3bn / Parliament) is not derived from a published model. The MAC December 2025 modelling shows Skilled Worker main applicants with +£689,000 lifetime contribution per person; rescinding ILR removes contributors as well as costs. Reform's model has not been independently scrutinised.

The detention and removals infrastructure is not yet specified. Comparable scale exists only in the US (post-2025 ICE expansion at $170bn allocation). UK capacity to replicate is constrained by detention space, judicial process, third-country agreements, and the inability to negotiate returns with hostile states (Iran, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria — the largest current sources of small boat arrivals).

What a Reform government would not do

Pro-migration framing in any form. Integration investment. Refugee Convention adherence in current form. Family-route protection of the current type (Reform's £60,000 threshold and stricter family requirements would dramatically restrict family migration). Continued asylum hotel system in current form (replacement is offshore processing, not state dispersal as in Labour's plan). Engagement with international migration cooperation frameworks of EU type.

4. Liberal Democrats

Stated position (May 2026)

Ed Davey's Liberal Democrats hold the rights-and-coordination corner of the migration debate. The Lib Dem position, articulated through 2024 manifesto and subsequent statements, includes:

• UK-EU youth mobility scheme
• Reversal of family visa salary threshold increases
• Creation of safe legal routes and humanitarian visas
• Coordination with international partners on returns and joint operations
• Opposition to Reform-style mass deportation framing
• ECHR retention; opposition to derogation
• Support for international cooperation as alternative to deterrence

The party has been clear that it sees coordination — particularly with EU partners on Dublin-style returns and intelligence sharing — as the realistic mechanism for managing irregular arrivals.

What a Lib Dem package looks like

Restored EU coordination. Youth Mobility Scheme. Joint returns operations. Intelligence sharing. Re-engagement with EU asylum framework where possible post-Brexit. The package treats UK-EU isolation as the structural cause of much of the asylum-system dysfunction.

Family migration restoration. Reversal of family visa salary threshold increases. Restoration of family reunion routes for refugees. Article 8 protection maintained.

Safe legal routes expansion. Humanitarian visas. Refugee resettlement programmes funded properly. Country-specific schemes for major source countries (Sudan, Eritrea, Iran). The argument: small boat arrivals can be reduced if legal routes exist for the same protection-needs population.

Asylum hotel exit through dispersal investment. Shared with Labour but at faster pace and with more local-authority funding.

No ECHR withdrawal. No Refugee Convention denunciation. No mass deportation operation.

Returns through bilateral and EU agreements. Voluntary returns scaled at the 11x cost advantage. Enforced returns to safe countries with functional agreements.

Constraints on the Lib Dem package

The party is at low single-digit polling and has limited prospect of governing alone. Its package is therefore most relevant as a coalition position or as an influence on a Labour government under pressure.

The "coordination with EU" centrepiece depends on EU willingness to engage, which is itself contested — Migration Watch and others note that the previous Dublin arrangement saw the UK accept more transfers than it sent. EU re-engagement on asylum cooperation is not within UK unilateral control.

The safe legal routes argument has empirical support (irregular arrivals fall when legal alternatives exist) but volume implications that the party does not fully address. Resettlement schemes at the scale that would meaningfully replace small boat arrivals would require significant capacity.

What a Lib Dem government would not do

Mass deportation. ECHR withdrawal. Refugee Convention denunciation. Numerical caps. Hostile environment expansion. ILR retrospective restriction. 30-month refugee review cycle.

5. Green Party

Stated position (May 2026)

The Green Party of England and Wales, under Zack Polanski's leadership, has tripled membership since September 2025 and at the 8 May 2026 local elections won 586 seats. Polling has put the Greens ahead of both Labour and Conservatives in some recent surveys. The party's published Migration Policy is:

• Aspirational world without borders, with managed humane immigration in the interim
• All migrants treated as "citizens in waiting"
• Migration not treated as a criminal offence under any circumstances
• Three-month visitor visa for any arrival without other visa
• Settled status holders have full benefit, NHS, and student finance access on equal terms with British citizens
• All children born in UK automatically British citizens
• Statelessness commitment: once citizenship granted, cannot be removed
• Free advice and support for undocumented migrants to regularise status without penalty
• End of detention except for serious crime or national security

The Green position takes immigration as economically and morally positive, treats refugee protection as a moral commitment, and frames the asylum system's dysfunction as a political choice rather than an inherent constraint.

What a Green package looks like

Hostile environment dismantling. End of NRPF condition on visas. Removal of the deny-and-deter architecture across welfare, healthcare, schooling, and housing. Replacement with universal access for residents regardless of status, with regularisation pathways.

Asylum system humanisation. End of detention except in narrow circumstances. Right to work for asylum seekers from arrival. Family reunion expansion. End of 30-month refugee review cycle. Settlement on path equivalent to other migrants.

Climate-displacement framework. Green policy explicitly recognises climate-induced displacement as a category requiring UK reception responsibility. This is a significant departure from all other parties' positions and would expand protected categories.

Regularisation programmes. Long-term undocumented migrants given pathway to status. Inversely related to the Reform/Conservative deportation framing.

Integration investment of Danish-model type. Language training, employment programmes, residential dispersal — but funded as part of a wider redistributive economic programme rather than as a condition of restriction.

ECHR retention. Refugee Convention adherence. International cooperation on humanitarian basis.

Constraints on the Green package

The fiscal implications are significant and not fully costed in published Green materials. The MAC December 2025 modelling shows mixed lifetime fiscal contribution by route; expansion of access without contribution conditions would, on the standard fiscal modelling, produce net fiscal cost in the short and medium term.

The Green response is essentially that fiscal-balance is the wrong frame: migration is not a fiscal optimisation problem but a humanitarian and economic-justice question. This is a coherent position but it does not engage with the fiscal data on the data's own terms.

The political coalition for the Green package is relatively narrow nationally despite recent membership growth. Implementation would require either coalition with Labour (unlikely on these terms) or a much larger Green parliamentary presence than current polling suggests is achievable in 2029.

What a Green government would not do

Mass deportation. Numerical caps. ECHR withdrawal. NRPF as standard visa condition. Detention at current scale. 30-month refugee review. ILR restriction. Asylum hotels (though replacement model is community sponsorship and dispersal, not military bases). Hostile environment in any form.

6. Restore Britain

Note on this section

Restore Britain, founded by Rupert Lowe in June 2025 and converted to a political party in February 2026, sits to the right of Reform UK. The Hope Not Hate organisation has reported substantial overlap between Restore Britain's support base and existing far-right networks (former British Democratic Party, BNP, For Britain officials; Tommy Robinson endorsement; British neo-Nazi support including Patriotic Alternative leadership). The Wikipedia entry describes the party's support base as "a fragile divide on the far-right between civic nationalists on one side, and ethnic nationalists on the other."

This section presents the party's published policy positions as it states them, but the reader should be aware that the political coalition behind the party is not solely civic-nationalist. The party's leader has not consistently distanced the party from ethnonationalist support.

Stated position (May 2026)

Restore Britain's published policies (133-page mass deportation document; subsequent statements by Lowe) include:

• Net-negative immigration target (more leaving than arriving)
• Mass deportation of all undocumented residents
• ECHR withdrawal
• Referendum on reinstating capital punishment
• Banning of burqa and niqab
• Abolition of kosher and halal slaughter
• Restoration of "Christian principles"
• Substantial reduction in BBC public funding or abolition

Polling: Findoutnow in April 2026 had Restore Britain at 9% support; Reform at 21%.

What a Restore Britain package looks like

Mass deportation operation, larger than Reform's. Scope: all undocumented residents plus reversal of substantial recent settled status. Mechanism: not specified in deliverable terms.

Net-negative immigration target. Currently net migration is approximately +200,000 (year ending June 2025). Net-negative requires either large outflows or near-elimination of inflows or both. The package does not specify how this would be achieved consistent with workforce and economic continuity.

Cultural restoration agenda. Bans on specific religious practices (burqa, niqab, kosher and halal slaughter) framed as restoration of Christian-cultural primacy. This goes beyond any other party's framing into specific cultural-and-religious legislation.

Legal rupture. ECHR withdrawal. Treaty consequences accepted. Capital punishment referendum.

Constraints on the Restore Britain package

The legal exposure is the highest of any package in this document — substantially higher than Reform's. The cultural-restoration legislation (kosher/halal ban; religious dress ban) engages Article 9 ECHR (freedom of religion) and Article 14 (discrimination), and would face challenge under Refugee Convention non-refoulement provisions for the deportation operation.

The deliverability of net-negative immigration without major economic dislocation is not modelled. UK demographic structure (ageing population, low domestic fertility, sectoral labour shortage) makes net-negative migration produce major labour-market and fiscal pressures that the package does not address.

The political coalition includes elements that other parties (and members of the public) characterise as far-right or ethnonationalist. The party's position on this is contested. The reader should make their own assessment.

What a Restore Britain government would not do

Pro-migration framing of any kind. Refugee protection beyond very narrow categories. Multicultural framework recognition. Continued ECHR or Refugee Convention adherence. Religious pluralism as legal framework. International cooperation on migration of any meaningful kind.

7. Where they agree

Across this six-party spectrum, there are genuine areas of convergence that often get lost in the contestation. Worth flagging because the policy options that have cross-party support are the most deliverable.

End of asylum hotels. Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, Reform, and Restore Britain all want this. Greens want the same outcome with different replacement model. The unit-cost case (£170/day vs £27/day) and the NAO contract overrun documentation are accepted across parties. This is the most deliverable single piece of migration policy in the political system as it stands.

Profit caps or reform on asylum accommodation contracts. Labour, Lib Dem, Green, and most likely Conservative would back this. Reform supports it implicitly through contract abolition. Restore Britain has not addressed it. The cross-partisan procurement coalition is real.

Voluntary returns expansion. Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, Reform all support scaling voluntary returns at the 11x cost advantage over enforced returns. Greens support voluntary returns where the person chooses to return. Restore Britain prefers enforced.

MAC strengthening and evidence-led approach. Labour explicitly supports. Conservative position varies but tends to engage MAC. Lib Dems support evidence-led approach. Greens accept MAC findings selectively. Reform and Restore Britain have engaged less with MAC.

Action on smuggling networks. Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, Reform all support — though disagree on whether this is sufficient (Labour says yes, Conservative/Reform say no). Greens prefer humanitarian framing but accept anti-smuggling action. Restore Britain prefers harder enforcement.

Tighter sponsor-licence compliance. Cross-partisan support including in many Reform-controlled local authorities now exercising the licensing function.

Fiscal data transparency. Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, Green would all accept a Migration Fiscal Ledger with route × status breakdowns. Reform and Restore Britain might support a version that emphasises cost over contribution.

8. Where they sharply differ

The genuine fault lines, set out cleanly:

On ECHR. Labour: keep. Lib Dem: keep. Green: keep. Conservative: leave. Reform: leave. Restore Britain: leave.

On retrospective restriction of existing ILR holders. Labour: no. Conservative: no (prospective only). Lib Dem: no. Green: no. Reform: yes (rescission). Restore Britain: yes.

On numerical caps on legal migration. Labour: no. Conservative: yes (level unspecified). Lib Dem: no. Green: no. Reform: yes (emergency brake). Restore Britain: yes (net-negative).

On asylum claims from new illegal entrants. Labour: process them. Conservative: ban them. Lib Dem: process them with safe legal routes alternative. Green: process them with humanitarian framing. Reform: ban them and review existing grants. Restore Britain: ban them and reverse grants.

On Refugee Convention. Labour: keep. Conservative: keep but disapply where possible. Lib Dem: keep. Green: keep and expand. Reform: implicit denunciation through proposed actions. Restore Britain: implicit denunciation.

On Family route. Labour: maintain with current thresholds; some flexibility. Conservative: tighten further. Lib Dem: ease (reverse threshold increases). Green: ease substantially. Reform: tighten dramatically (£60,000 threshold via new visa). Restore Britain: minimal family migration.

On NRPF. Labour: maintain. Conservative: tighten. Lib Dem: narrow in vulnerable cases. Green: abolish. Reform: extend. Restore Britain: extend.

On integration investment. Labour: limited. Conservative: limited. Lib Dem: substantial. Green: substantial. Reform: minimal. Restore Britain: minimal.

On safe legal routes. Labour: capped expansion. Conservative: minimal. Lib Dem: substantial. Green: substantial. Reform: minimal. Restore Britain: minimal.

On detention. Labour: current scale. Conservative: expanded. Lib Dem: narrowed. Green: minimal except security cases. Reform: massively expanded. Restore Britain: massively expanded.

9. The gravitational pulls

Three observations on where the political force in the system is currently concentrated, drawn from the May 2026 local election results.

Reform's gravitational pull on the right. With Reform leading polls and Conservatives losing votes to it on the right flank, the Conservative position has hardened sharply since Badenoch took the leadership in November 2024. The Borders Plan announced October 2025 and the ECHR withdrawal commitment of March 2026 are responses to the Reform threat as much as to underlying policy analysis.

Green's gravitational pull on the left. With Greens overtaking both Labour and Conservatives in some polls and Polanski's tripling of membership, the Lib Dem and Labour positions face pressure from the left as well. Labour in particular faces the pincer of losing pro-migration voters to Greens and anti-migration voters to Reform.

The squeezed centre. The "Phillips/Goodhart/Frederiksen-with-investment" position outlined in the parallel what_i_would_do document — civic-nationalist, integrationist, contribution-based, ECHR-retaining — does not have a clear partisan home in the current system. Labour has moved away from it; the Conservatives have moved past it; the Lib Dems are too small to vehicle it; the Greens reject it on values. Most of the British public's polling positions cluster around it but no single party currently champions it cleanly.

10. What this means for the data

The same evidence base — the workbook, the MAC December 2025 figures, the HMRC/Home Office linked data, the DWP UC by status data, the NAO asylum contract findings — supports each of these six positions when weighted against the party's particular values.

Labour weights swift delivery and capacity-building above either deterrence-by-restriction or expansion-of-access.

The Conservatives weight rule-of-law restoration through legal-architecture rupture above continuity of the international framework.

Reform weights mass-scale enforcement and contribution gating above legal-certainty for current residents.

The Lib Dems weight international coordination and rights protection above unilateral restriction.

The Greens weight humanitarian framing and economic-justice integration above fiscal-balance optimisation.

Restore Britain weights cultural-and-demographic restoration above continuity of plural democracy in current form.

The data does not adjudicate between these. It informs each of them. Every party can find evidence in the workbook for some of its positions and against some of its positions. That is not a flaw of the data — it is the actual nature of policy choice in a society that holds multiple legitimate values in tension.

11. Three scenarios for the next two years

Scenario A: Labour holds. The current package implements with some hardening (faster hotel exit, tightened earned settlement). Migration policy remains in evidence-led-with-enforcement mode. The Greens grow but don't displace. Reform peaks below government level.

Scenario B: Conservative-Reform realignment. A general election (constitutionally due by 2029) produces either a Reform-led government, a Conservative-Reform coalition, or a Conservative government implementing substantially Reform-aligned policies under voter pressure. ECHR withdrawal becomes live. Mass deportation programme becomes operational. Legal architecture rupture begins.

Scenario C: Fragmentation. No party reaches majority. The Greens, Lib Dems, Reform, Conservatives, and Labour all hold significant Commons strength. Migration policy stalls in coalition negotiation. The status quo holds by default.

The May 2026 local elections suggest Scenario A is weakening; Scenarios B and C are both live. The data position will not change much over this period — no major new releases are expected before 2027 — so the political question dominates over the analytical one.

12. Conventions

On framing: I have tried to represent each party's serious version, not its caricature. If any party feels misrepresented, the source documents are listed for self-checking.

On the Restore Britain section: I have noted the ethnonationalist support without characterising the party's stated policy as ethnonationalist. Both the policy as stated and the support base are presented; readers can assess.

On Labour as governing party: Treated through actual implementation rather than through previous opposition rhetoric.

On polling: Polling shifts week to week. The figures in this document reflect roughly the May 2026 local election aftermath. Different snapshots would show different relative positions.

What this document does not do: Endorse any party. Adjudicate between values frameworks. Predict election outcomes. Replace the workbook or the descriptive report as evidence base — those documents remain primary; this document is interpretive.

End of document.

19. The Pre-2026 ILR Cohort ("Boriswave"): A Dedicated Analysis

What this section is

This section addresses what the gaps review correctly identified as the most politically central object of UK migration policy 2025-2030, currently named in the master document but not analysed at the depth its centrality warrants. The "Boriswave" — the cohort of migrants admitted under the substantially liberalised post-2020 framework, principally 2022-2024 — is the single largest decision facing UK migration policy this Parliament.

Scale and composition

The Home Office's own published estimates, set out in the Earned Settlement consultation document of November 2025, project that under previous ILR rules approximately 1.3 to 2.2 million migrants would have become eligible for settlement between 2026 and 2030. The central forecast is 1.6 million.

Compositionally, the cohort is dominated by two routes that were dramatically expanded in the 2020-2022 period:

The Health and Care Worker visa. Reforms removed the salary floor and added care workers to the shortage occupation list in February 2022. Between 2022 and 2024, approximately 616,000 individuals arrived through this route. The Home Secretary's November 2025 statement to the House noted that more than half of these were dependants rather than primary care workers. The original Home Office estimate of need was 6,000-40,000 jobs; the actual inflow exceeded this by an order of magnitude. Subsequent enforcement action against sponsors revealed substantial abuse — sponsorship licences revoked, workers found to be unemployed or in unrelated work, and trafficking cases.

The post-Brexit Skilled Worker route. Lower salary and skill thresholds than the previous Tier 2 system, plus the removal of the resident labour market test. Between 2021 and 2024, Skilled Worker grants ran at substantially higher volumes than the Tier 2 era. Median earnings for Skilled Worker main applicants outside health and care had median earnings of £56,600 (HMRC/Home Office linked data, May 2025) — well above both the salary threshold and the UK full-time median comparator used in this document.

Other routes (student-to-skilled-worker switches, family route, Graduate route) contribute additional volume.

Why this matters

For the fiscal frame: the MAC December 2025 modelling shows substantial route-level variation. Skilled Worker main applicants outside health and care are positive (+£689,000 lifetime per person) but Health and Care Worker dependants are negative (-£67,000) and Family partner route is negative (-£109,000). The Boriswave is disproportionately weighted toward routes with weaker fiscal performance because the Health and Care visa dependant cohort is the largest single component.

For the political frame: this cohort settling under previous rules would generate ILR grants in 2027-2029 substantially exceeding any historical UK precedent. The Home Office's central forecast peak of approximately 359,000 ILR grants in 2028 (under unchanged rules) compares with the previous peak of approximately 240,000 in 2010. Several years exceeding the 2010 peak in succession would be a fundamental shift in the UK settled population structure.

For the cohesion frame: the pace of arrival 2022-2024 was unprecedented in modern UK history. Pace effects on cohesion (per the Casey Review and the Cantle tradition) are amplified relative to either smaller cohorts arriving over the same period or this cohort arriving over a longer period. Settlement of this cohort en masse extends the pace effects from arrival into the settlement and citizenship pipeline.

For the demographic frame: the Boriswave shifts the UK working-age age structure favourably in the short term (most arrivals are working-age) but adds substantial dependants who are not currently in the workforce. Net demographic effect depends on subsequent labour market integration outcomes which are not yet measured at the cohort level.

For the protection frame: this section is mostly distinct from refugee questions because the Boriswave is overwhelmingly economic migration, not asylum-route migration. Refugee numbers in the same period are an order of magnitude smaller.

The Earned Settlement response

The Labour government's Earned Settlement framework, consulted on November 2025 to February 2026, is explicitly designed to address this cohort. Key elements as currently consulted:

• Standard ILR qualifying period extended from 5 to 10 years for most routes
• For roles below RQF Level 6 (including health and care positions), qualifying period potentially up to 15 years
• High earners (above £50,270 / £125,140 thresholds) retain shorter qualifying periods of 3-5 years
• "Earned" status linked to four pillars: character, integration (B2 English plus Life in UK), contribution (NI contributions on earnings above £12,570 for 3-5 years), and continuous residence
• Refugees on core protection: 20-year qualifying period (from the March 2026 reforms)
• Safe-and-legal-route arrivals: 10 years
• Implementation pushed from original April 2026 target to "later in 2026"

The government's published intention is explicitly to apply these changes to migrants already in the UK who have not yet obtained settled status. This is the politically and legally consequential element. Earned Settlement is not solely prospective from the date of legislation — it changes the rules under which the existing Boriswave cohort qualifies.

The Home Office's own behavioural assumption: 10-20% reduction in affected inflows from the policy package as a whole. The cohort already in the UK is the largest component the policy is designed to address.

What is contested

Whether retrospective application is lawful. The Earned Settlement consultation explicitly proposes applying changes to people already in the UK on existing visas. This raises Article 8 ECHR family life questions where settlement decisions affect British-citizen children, Article 1 of Protocol 1 questions on legitimate expectations and accrued rights, and Article 14 discrimination questions where implementation has differential effect by route or nationality. Legal challenges are highly likely; outcomes are uncertain. The legal frame is closer to "changing the rules during the qualifying period" than to "retrospective rescission" of granted status, which makes it less legally exposed than full retrospective rescission but still substantially exposed.

Whether the volume reduction is sufficient. Charlie Cole's analysis in The Critic (January 2026; The Critic is a centre-right magazine and Cole writes from a restrictionist perspective — the underlying figures verify against the Home Office command paper), working from the Home Office's own published projections, suggests that even under the "low case" scenario the 2010 peak is exceeded in 2027, 2028 and 2029. Critics from the right argue the package addresses the cohort partially but does not prevent the unprecedented settlement bulge. Critics from the left argue the package creates a status-uncertain underclass for 10-15 years with measurable integration and welfare costs.

Whether health and care workforce can be sustained. The Health and Care Worker route was closed to new overseas recruitment in July 2025. Existing workers can extend and switch but the steady-state replacement pipeline is constrained. The Home Affairs Committee March 2026 report flagged that hundreds of thousands of care workers face uncertain futures while replacement domestic workforce has not materialised at the rate required. Earned Settlement at 15 years for below-RQF6 routes (where most care workers sit) intensifies the workforce-retention question because workers face longer paths to settlement than other routes.

The political alignment

Labour: the Earned Settlement package is the central response. The framework gives Labour a serious-looking package without the legal exposure of Reform's retrospective rescission proposal, while still substantially addressing the cohort.

Conservative: The 5-to-10 year extension was a Badenoch announcement before Labour formalised it. Conservative position is broadly aligned with Labour direction but proposes harder thresholds and faster implementation. The "Boriswave" framing creates a Conservative vulnerability — these arrivals occurred under Conservative governments — that Conservative messaging has not yet fully resolved.

Reform: Proposes full ILR abolition for new applicants and rescission with re-application at £60,000 threshold for existing ILR holders. The retrospective rescission of existing ILR is the legally weakest element (existing ILR holders have stronger vested rights than people who have not yet qualified). Reform's £14.3 billion fiscal saving claim relates partly to this cohort but lacks a published model.

Restore Britain: Larger ambition than Reform, less specified mechanism. The Boriswave is treated as evidence for fundamental reset rather than addressed through specific policy.

Lib Dem, Green, SNP, Plaid: Generally oppose retrospective application of Earned Settlement, supporting prospective-only changes. Concerned about creating status-uncertain underclasses and about workforce effects in care and other sectors. Argue that fiscal projections of cohort cost are sensitive to integration assumptions that policy can affect.

DUP: Generally aligned with the contribution-based principle but with NI-specific care workforce concerns given the cross-border labour market.

What the data does and does not adjudicate

The data confirms scale (the cohort exists at the volume named), composition (dominated by Health and Care visa and Skilled Worker route), fiscal variation by sub-route (Skilled Worker main applicants positive, Health and Care dependants negative), and behavioural-response uncertainty (the 10-20% inflow reduction is a Home Office assumption, not a measurement).

The data does not adjudicate whether the Earned Settlement framework's retrospective application will survive legal challenge, whether the workforce trajectory in care can be sustained, what the cohort's actual long-term contribution will be (because it depends on subsequent earnings trajectories not yet observed), or what political consequences flow from any specific volume of 2027-2030 ILR grants.

The Boriswave is the central decision the current Parliament will take on settled population. Every party has positioned around it; the data informs but does not resolve the choice.

Part VIII — Implementation, Forward Analysis, and Legal Architecture

This part provides the implementation infrastructure that translates the options menu and party packages into deliverable policy: roadmaps for major options; a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning framework; legal deep-dive on ECHR articles and case-law; scenario stress-tests for major external shocks; historical context on post-1945 UK migration policy; analysis of returns-leverage tools by destination country; and the GDP-per-capita versus aggregate-GDP question.

VIII.1 — Implementation Roadmaps for Major Options

Asylum Procurement Reform (Option 2)

Primary legislation needed: None for first phase; existing procurement powers cover renegotiation, profit caps, and open-book contracting. Primary legislation would be needed for fundamental contract restructuring or new commissioning architecture.

• Months 0-6: Open-book contracting demand on existing AASC contracts; profit cap negotiation
• Months 6-18: Tender preparation for AASC successor framework (current contracts run to 2029)
• Months 18-36: Phased transition to successor framework with capacity expansion alongside hotel exit
• Months 36-48: Full hotel exit; new framework operational

Key delivery bodies: Home Office Commercial Directorate; UKVI; local authority partnerships; Crown Commercial Service.

Capacity gaps: Home Office contract management has expanded substantially since 2023 but specialised procurement expertise for accommodation at scale is limited. Independent commercial advisory support recommended.

Legal challenges: Limited if existing contract terms are used. Higher exposure if termination clauses are invoked aggressively before contract end. Mitigation: phased transition rather than abrupt termination.

Pilot/phased rollout: Yes — open-book contracting can begin in single region (e.g. Mears North East) before national rollout. Profit cap negotiation can proceed contract-by-contract.

Monitoring metrics: Per-person-per-day cost; supplier margin; transition rate from hotels to dispersal; safeguarding incident rate; service quality measures.

Migration Fiscal Ledger (Option 1)

Primary legislation needed: Yes — to mandate joint Home Office/HMRC/DWP publication and to provide statutory basis for cross-departmental data sharing. Could be added to existing migration legislation rather than standalone.

• Months 0-6: Cross-departmental working group; data sharing agreement; methodology design
• Months 6-12: Pilot publication using existing linked data
• Months 12-24: Statutory framework legislation; first full publication
• Months 24+: Annual publication cycle

Key delivery bodies: ONS (publication and methodology); HMRC (tax data); DWP (benefits data); Home Office (immigration status); MAC (oversight).

Capacity gaps: ONS migration team has capacity but specific Migration Fiscal Ledger function would require additional resource. Estimated 15-25 FTE across the contributing departments.

Legal challenges: Limited; data linkage is already established for MAC December 2025 work. Privacy framework needs careful design but is workable.

Pilot/phased rollout: Yes — initial publication can use existing MAC and HMRC linked data; subsequent enhancements over time.

Monitoring metrics: Publication timeliness; cross-departmental data linkage completeness; user uptake (ONS website analytics, parliamentary citation, academic citation).

Earned Settlement Implementation (Option 4)

Primary legislation needed: Yes — Statement of Changes to Immigration Rules sufficient for some elements; primary legislation needed for fundamental qualifying period extension.

• Already in train: White Paper May 2025; consultation 2025-2026; finalised policy autumn 2026
• Months 0-12 from finalisation: Statement of Changes implementation; transitional arrangements for in-flight applicants
• Months 12-36: Steady-state operation; first cohort affected reaching new qualifying point
• Months 36+: Long-term operation; quality assurance and case-law development

Key delivery bodies: Home Office UKVI; First-tier Tribunal (for appeals); MOJ (legal aid implications).

Capacity gaps: Visa processing capacity should be sufficient for the framework. Tribunal capacity for appeals is the principal risk; Earned Settlement determination disputes will create new appellate caseload.

Legal challenges: Moderate. Article 8 ECHR exposure for separation cases. Article 14 exposure if implementation has discriminatory effect. Article 1 of Protocol 1 exposure for retrospective elements. Mitigation: prospective-only application; clear transitional arrangements; published guidance.

Pilot/phased rollout: Phased through transitional arrangements rather than pilot in narrow sense.

Monitoring metrics: Application volume; grant rate; appeal rate and outcome; behavioural-response evidence (does inflow change?); fiscal contribution by cohort over time.

Voluntary Returns Scaling (operational priority, complementary to Option 11)

Primary legislation needed: None — operational expansion under existing powers.

• Months 0-12: Programme expansion; staffing increase; partnership development with IOM and similar
• Months 12-24: Triple current scale (~12,000 to ~36,000 per year)
• Months 24+: Steady state; potential further expansion based on capacity

Key delivery bodies: Home Office; IOM (International Organisation for Migration); destination-country reintegration partners.

Capacity gaps: Voluntary Returns Service has capacity to expand but requires staffing investment; partnership framework with destinations needs strengthening.

Legal challenges: Minimal — voluntary by definition.

Pilot/phased rollout: Already operating; expansion is incremental.

Monitoring metrics: Volume; cost per return; sustainability of return (re-arrival rate); reintegration outcomes where measurable.

Right-to-Work for Asylum Seekers (not numbered in Part II options menu; cross-referenced in the Crime section as evidence-based intervention)

Primary legislation needed: Statement of Changes to Immigration Rules sufficient.

• Months 0-6: Policy decision and legal change
• Months 6-12: Implementation; communication to asylum population; employer guidance
• Months 12-24: Steady state; outcome monitoring

Key delivery bodies: Home Office; DWP (UC interaction); employer compliance.

Capacity gaps: Limited — most infrastructure exists from existing limited right-to-work after 12 months.

Legal challenges: Minimal — moves UK toward European norm.

Pilot/phased rollout: Could pilot at 6-month right-to-work before extending to immediate. Most evidence supports immediate.

Monitoring metrics: Asylum-seeker employment rate; tax contribution; UC reduction; integration outcomes; appeal-stage case quality (employed asylum seekers may have stronger Article 8 cases).

Returns Capacity Expansion (Option 11)

Primary legislation needed: Possibly — depends on enforcement powers being expanded. Detention infrastructure expansion needs property and capital authorisation.

• Months 0-12: Capacity gap analysis; bilateral negotiations with priority destinations
• Months 12-36: Detention capacity expansion (if pursued); enforcement officer recruitment
• Months 36-60: Steady state at expanded capacity; sustainability assessment

Key delivery bodies: Home Office Immigration Enforcement; FCDO (returns negotiations); MOJ (judicial framework).

Capacity gaps: Substantial. Detention building takes 2-4 years per facility. Enforcement officer training takes 1-2 years. Returns negotiations take 2-5 years per agreement.

Legal challenges: High. Detention conditions; returnability determinations; Article 3 ECHR for returns to specific destinations; Refugee Convention non-refoulement.

Pilot/phased rollout: Difficult to pilot at scale; expansion is incremental.

Monitoring metrics: Returns volume; voluntary share; cost per return; sustainability; legal challenge outcomes.

VIII.2 — Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Framework

Purpose

The MEL framework provides ongoing measurement of migration policy outcomes regardless of which policy package is implemented. Without it, policy change cannot be properly evaluated.

Core indicators

• Net migration (ONS)
• Inflow by route
• Outflow by category
• Asylum applications and grants
• Returns by category

• Tax contribution by route × year × age (HMRC linked)
• Benefit consumption by status (DWP)
• Net fiscal position by route (MAC)
• Local authority cost-shift (NRPF Connect, LGA)

• Employment rate by route × time-since-arrival
• English language proficiency
• Educational attainment of children of migrants
• Geographic dispersal patterns
• Civic participation indicators

• School roll growth in receiving areas
• GP registration patterns
• Housing pressure indicators
• Local authority service spend

• Asylum accommodation cost per person
• Supplier margins
• Service quality measures
• Decision quality (appeal rates by category)

• BSAS annual migration tracker
• Monthly polling on confidence in delivery
• Trust in Home Office statistics

Publication framework

Annual Migration Outcomes Report combining indicators across departments. Published by ONS with cross-departmental contributions. Statutory basis through Migration Fiscal Ledger legislation. Open data publication with documented methodology.

Learning loops

Annual review by MAC and LMEG. Cross-party parliamentary review. Independent academic evaluation funded through existing research council frameworks.

VIII.3 — Legal Deep-Dive Appendix

Key legal frameworks affecting migration policy

• Article 3 — prohibition of torture/inhuman treatment (non-refoulement; detention conditions)
• Article 5 — right to liberty (detention without time limits)
• Article 8 — right to family and private life (deportation of long-term residents; minimum income requirements)
• Article 14 — non-discrimination (interaction with all other articles)
• Protocol 1 Article 1 — peaceful enjoyment of possessions (vested rights including ILR)

• Article 1A — definition of refugee
• Article 3 — non-discrimination
• Article 23 — public relief
• Article 24 — labour legislation and social security
• Article 31 — refugees unlawfully in country of refuge
• Article 32 — expulsion
• Article 33 — non-refoulement

• Immigration Act 1971 (foundational)
• Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009
• Immigration Act 2014, 2016
• Nationality and Borders Act 2022
• Illegal Migration Act 2023
• Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025
• Earned Settlement provisions (in development)

Recent case-law trends

Article 8 deportation cases: Settled balance between public interest in deportation and family/private life rights. Recent cases (Rochdale grooming gang ringleaders) have produced political pressure but legal framework has held.

Article 3 returns cases: UK Supreme Court November 2023 AAA v Home Department judgment on Rwanda established that returns to a country must be evaluated for Article 3 risk including indirect refoulement. Subsequent legislation (Safety of Rwanda Act) attempted to override; effects contested.

Detention cases: Ongoing case-law on detention duration, conditions, mental health considerations, judicial review thresholds. UK lacks statutory time limits which is the principal Article 5 exposure.

ILR rescission cases: Limited recent case-law because retrospective ILR rescission has not been attempted at scale. Article 1 of Protocol 1 jurisprudence on vested rights would be central to any challenge.

ECHR withdrawal cascade

Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (1998): ECHR rights are integrated into the agreement and Northern Ireland Act 1998. Withdrawal produces direct constitutional issue requiring either NI-specific replacement protections or Agreement renegotiation.

UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (2021): ECHR membership is referenced in the law-enforcement and judicial cooperation provisions. Withdrawal produces grounds for partial or full termination of TCA cooperation, with consequential effects on Schengen Information System access, Europol cooperation, European Arrest Warrant, and similar.

Extradition treaties: UK extradition treaties with non-EU states often reference ECHR-equivalent rights protection. Withdrawal complicates extradition relationships globally, though some are bilateral and could be re-negotiated.

Domestic constitutional implications: Human Rights Act 1998 incorporates ECHR; if ECHR is denounced, HRA effect changes. Devolved administrations (Scotland, Wales, NI) have ECHR rights embedded in their founding legislation; withdrawal produces devolution settlement issues.

Refugee Convention denunciation

The Refugee Convention has no formal denunciation mechanism. States parties may withdraw under general international law principles (12 months notice). Denunciation would be unprecedented for a Western state and would produce reputational and diplomatic consequences with wider international system.

Legal exposure summary by option

• Migration Fiscal Ledger: Low. Privacy framework needs careful design.
• Asylum procurement reform: Low. Standard procurement law.
• Voluntary returns scaling: Minimal.
• Earned Settlement implementation: Moderate. Article 8 and 14 exposure.
• 30-month refugee review reversal: Low. Refugee Convention compliance.
• Safe legal routes expansion: Low.
• Right-to-work for asylum seekers: Low.
• Danish-model integration investment: Minimal direct legal exposure.
• NRPF reform: Moderate. Equality Act and possibly ECHR.
• Family route restoration: Low.
• Returns capacity expansion: High. Detention conditions, returnability, non-refoulement.
• Numerical migration caps: Low-moderate. Implementation can produce indirect discrimination challenges.
• Retrospective ILR restriction: Very high. P1 Article 1, Article 14, Article 8.
• ECHR withdrawal: Very high direct effect plus cascade.

VIII.4 — Scenario Stress-Tests

Scenario A — Major Mediterranean / European refugee flow (2027-2028)

Trigger: New regional conflict producing 2-5 million displaced persons (Middle East / North Africa scenarios; possible Eastern European scenarios; Sahel scenarios).

UK exposure: Direct asylum applications increase substantially; pressure on dispersal capacity; political amplification.

• Restoration package: handles partially; proportionate response with international coordination; some operational strain.
• Restriction package: legal frameworks tested by surge; political pressure for further restriction; possible international cooperation breakdown.
• Investment package: handles best operationally; significant fiscal cost; political vulnerability if integration outcomes lag.

System failures most likely: Dispersal capacity; tribunal capacity for appeal surge; political coalition for any sustained response.

Scenario B — Climate displacement acceleration (2028-2032)

Trigger: Faster-than-projected climate displacement from low-lying states, Sahel, South Asia. UNHCR estimates revised upward.

UK exposure: Less direct than continental Europe; substantial pressure for resettlement scheme participation; framing pressure on protection vs sovereignty.

• All packages currently under-engage with climate displacement framework.
• The protection framing (Part V.2) and demographic framing (Part V.3) both flag this; no party platform currently has substantial climate-migration engagement.

Recommendation: Climate displacement framework development is a no-regrets policy investment regardless of broader package selection.

Scenario C — AI labour-market displacement faster than projected (2027-2030)

Trigger: Robotics maturity in low-paid sectors arrives 5-10 years earlier than central projection. Substantial automation in social care, agriculture, food processing, hospitality.

UK exposure: Migrant workforce in displaced sectors faces structural unemployment; reduced fiscal contribution from those routes; political pressure for migration restriction.

• Restoration package: needs adaptation through Earned Settlement contribution-based assessment.
• Restriction package: AI-driven sectoral demand reduction supports restrictionist case but does not address transitional cohort.
• Investment package: integration investment supports retraining of displaced workforce.

Recommendation: AI-aware sectoral workforce planning (the new option proposed in Part V.4) is essential regardless of broader package.

Scenario D — Major UK economic downturn (2026-2028)

Trigger: Recession; unemployment rise; fiscal pressure; public service strain.

UK exposure: Migration becomes politically more contentious; fiscal pressure on welfare and public services; reduced absorptive capacity.

• All packages face political stress in this scenario.
• Fiscal-positive routes (Skilled Worker) may see reduced inflow as UK opportunities decline.
• Restrictionist packages gain political traction; pro-migration packages lose political tolerance.

Recommendation: Migration policy frameworks should be designed to be robust to economic cycle, not optimised for current conditions.

Scenario E — Major UK political realignment (2028-2029)

Trigger: General election produces Reform-led government, Reform-Conservative coalition, or Conservative-led government implementing substantially Reform-aligned package.

UK exposure: ECHR withdrawal becomes live; mass deportation infrastructure development begins; Refugee Convention denunciation becomes politically possible.

• Restoration and Investment packages would not be implemented in this scenario.
• Restriction package would be implemented at varying speeds depending on coalition arithmetic.
• Legal architecture cascade effects begin manifesting through 2029-2032.

Recommendation: Cross-partisan deliverable items (procurement reform, voluntary returns, FNO removal, Migration Fiscal Ledger) should be implemented before any election to lock in evidence-led delivery.

VIII.5 — Historical Context

Key turning points in post-1945 UK migration policy

1948 British Nationality Act: All Commonwealth citizens UK-resident; foundation of post-war migration including Windrush generation.

1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act: First substantive restriction on Commonwealth migration; voucher system.

1971 Immigration Act: Foundational framework; settled-status concept; "patrial" distinction. Continues as base.

1981 British Nationality Act: Reformed citizenship; reduced automatic Commonwealth rights.

1990s asylum framework: Major increase in asylum applications; system development; Convention obligations met variably.

2004 EU enlargement: UK opened labour market immediately to A8 countries; substantial inflow over following decade.

2010-2016 Conservative-led government: Net migration target (failed); points-based system tightened; hostile environment introduced; Brexit referendum.

2016-2020: Brexit transition; freedom of movement ended.

2020-2024: Post-Brexit framework; net migration peaked at 906,000 in 2023; Hong Kong BNO and Ukraine schemes.

May 2024 election - present: Labour government; May 2025 White Paper; Earned Settlement framework; current trajectory.

Lessons from history

Net migration targets without delivery infrastructure fail. The 2010-2024 Conservative experience is consistent on this. Targets without operational mechanisms produce political damage when missed.

Scheme-specific responses to specific crises work. Hong Kong BNO and Ukraine schemes both delivered substantial reception with broad public support. Country-specific framing facilitates political legitimacy.

Hostile environment policies produce indirect costs. The Windrush scandal demonstrated that hostile environment frameworks generate documentation requirements that catch British citizens as well as migrants. The Office of Public Inquiry into Windrush (2018-2020) produced findings still being implemented.

EU framework was politically unsustainable at the time. The 2004-2016 period showed that uncontrolled EU labour mobility was politically unsustainable in the UK context. Whether equivalent UK control with continued cooperation could have worked is contested.

Asylum system reforms have repeated patterns. Each major reform (1990s, 2002 Act, 2014, 2016, 2022, 2023) has introduced restrictions that have generated case-law constraining their application. Policy makers should expect this pattern in current reforms.

VIII.6 — Returns Leverage Analysis

Tools for forcing returns cooperation

Visa sanctions (most powerful for some destinations): Restricting visas for nationals of countries that refuse returns. UK-Pakistan agreement 2024 used this leverage successfully. Effective for countries with substantial UK-bound visa flow.

Aid conditionality: Linking development aid to returns cooperation. Limited current use; politically and ethically contested. Effective only for countries where UK aid is substantial proportion of total aid.

Trade leverage: Linking trade access to returns cooperation. Politically contested; limited current use.

Diplomatic engagement: Bilateral relationships and high-level political pressure. Slow, partial, country-specific.

Multilateral frameworks: EU returns agreements (UK now bilateral); Council of Europe frameworks; UN-level pressure. Limited UK leverage post-EU exit.

Country-specific assessment for major source countries

Pakistan: Visa-sanction leverage worked; agreement in place since 2024; sustained cooperation depends on implementation discipline.

India: Substantial economic relationship limits aid leverage; visa flow substantial which provides leverage; cooperation moderate.

Bangladesh: Similar to India.

Iran: No diplomatic relationship; sanctions framework; returns effectively impossible.

Eritrea: Hostile state; no functional cooperation possible.

Afghanistan: Taliban government; UK does not recognise; returns problematic on Article 3 grounds even if political possible.

Sudan: Active conflict; returns not possible.

Syria: Active conflict; no diplomatic relationship; returns not possible.

Vietnam: Cooperation increasing through 2024-2025; trafficking-focused engagement.

Albania: Cooperation strong (EU-aspiring state); returns volume substantial.

Iraq: Variable cooperation; KRG distinct from federal Iraq.

Turkey: Cooperation moderate; Turkey is also major receiving state for transit migration.

Realistic returns capacity assessment

Of approximately 200,000 net migration in YE June 2025, the population subject to potential return (refused asylum claims, expired visas, irregular entrants without status) is a smaller subset. Of this subset, the proportion returnable (cooperating destinations, no Article 3 barrier, removal feasible) is smaller still. Estimated annual sustainable returns volume with substantial capacity expansion: 50,000-80,000. The Reform 150,000 target exceeds this without creating new returnability through diplomatic breakthroughs that have not been specified.

VIII.7 — GDP Per Capita Analysis

The aggregate vs per-capita question

Aggregate GDP measures total economic output. Migration adds to aggregate GDP because each working-age migrant contributes to economic output.

GDP per capita measures output per person. Migration's effect is contested — depends on whether migrants' productivity is at, above, or below UK-born average.

The recent UK debate has emphasised that aggregate GDP growth from migration may have masked stagnant or declining GDP per capita. This is a substantive argument.

Evidence on UK GDP per capita and migration

ONS data on UK GDP per capita has shown weakness through the 2010s and 2020s. UK GDP per capita growth has lagged peer states; productivity growth has been weak.

Whether migration is causally implicated is contested. Migration Observatory and IFS analyses suggest:

• Skilled migration (Skilled Worker route median £56,600 earnings) is at or above UK median, supporting GDP per capita.
• Health & Care Worker route (median £30,900) is below UK median, slightly drag on GDP per capita.
• Family route earnings vary; analysis suggests slight drag on GDP per capita.

Net effect: modest. Aggregate growth from migration is real; per capita effect depends on route mix.

• Restrictionist framings emphasise per capita measure; argue that less migration is better for "wealth per person."
• Pro-migration framings emphasise aggregate measure plus second-generation effects; argue that per capita measure underestimates long-term contribution.

The honest reading: route differentiation matters. Skilled migration is GDP-per-capita positive; lower-paid routes are slightly negative on GDP per capita but may be positive when public service workforce contribution is properly accounted for (NHS migration enables NHS service which has welfare value beyond GDP per capita measurement).

The fiscal frame (Parts I-IV) and the GDP per capita frame partially overlap but are not identical. Fiscal contribution captures tax-and-benefit balance; GDP per capita captures total economic output per person. Skilled migration is positive on both; lower-paid migration can be GDP-per-capita slightly negative while still being fiscally positive (because public service contribution generates fiscal value beyond direct tax-and-benefit accounting).