The Brexit vote 10 years on: your questions answered

On 23 June 2016—exactly 10 years ago on Tuesday—the UK went to the polls to have its say on whether to remain in or to leave the European Union (EU).

A majority voted in favour of leaving, triggering several years of negotiations before the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020, entering a transition period until 31 December that year.

In the run-up to the anniversary of the referendum we asked our readers what questions they had about Brexit and how it changed the UK. We’ve answered some of them—including on the economy, immigration and that £350 million pledge—below.

Key questions on Brexit 10 years since the referendum

• What has happened to immigration since Brexit?
• How would the UK vote on Brexit now?
• How has Brexit affected the UK’s economy?
• Did the NHS get that £350 million a week?

What has happened to immigration since Brexit?

In the lead-up to the EU referendum, immigration was regularly cited as the most important issue for voters. We’ve received questions from Chris and Tim on Facebook asking how Brexit has affected immigration levels, and whether it has given the UK greater control over its borders.

When it was a member of the EU, the UK was not able to set its own immigration rules for EU nationals. Leaving meant the end of freedom of movement (which allowed EU citizens to live and work in the UK without the need for a visa, and UK citizens to do the same in the EU), and led to the introduction of a new ‘points-based’ immigration system regulating both EU and non-EU immigration for work and study. This new system came into effect on 1 January 2021.

In the years following Brexit, immigration reached record levels. After initially falling during the Covid-19 pandemic, during which considerable travel restrictions were in place, long-term immigration to the UK (people moving to the UK for at least 12 months) increased between 2021 and 2023. It reached a record high of 1,469,000 in the year ending March 2023.

It has since fallen back to around the levels seen prior to the pandemic, though due to changes in the way these figures are calculated the immigration statistics since June 2021 are not directly comparable with those before then.

Following the referendum there has been a significant change in who is migrating to the UK. Before Brexit EU immigrants outnumbered non-EU immigrants, but that pattern has now reversed, with the vast majority of immigrants now arriving from non-EU countries. Net migration (immigration minus emigration) of non-EU nationals overtook that of EU nationals for the first time in 2018, and has remained higher ever since.

This is partly because the number of non-EU immigrants has increased, but also because the number of EU immigrants has been falling since the referendum in 2016 (though again, we don’t have directly comparable figures covering this entire period). Net migration from the EU has actually been negative since 2022, meaning more EU nationals are leaving the UK each year than arriving.

Most immigrants arriving in the UK in recent years, which have seen record levels of immigration and net migration, have been people arriving legally. But the number of people arriving via illegal entry routes and seeking asylum has also risen substantially since both Brexit and the pandemic.

Dr Peter Walsh of the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory told Full Fact: “There is some evidence that Brexit may have influenced the decision of some asylum seekers to come to the UK, although its impact is impossible to quantify. Before Brexit, the UK participated in the Dublin system, which allowed asylum seekers in the EU to be returned to the member state responsible for their claim, often the country of first arrival.

"The UK also had access to EURODAC, the EU fingerprint database, which helped states identify whether someone had previously claimed asylum or been recorded as entering irregularly elsewhere in Europe.

“In practice, Dublin returns from the UK were always relatively modest, so it would be wrong to say that Brexit alone explains the sharp increase in asylum claims or small boat arrivals. But the loss of Dublin and EURODAC did weaken one set of tools available to the UK: it is now harder to check systematically whether an applicant has already been registered elsewhere in Europe, and harder to transfer responsibility for claims back to another European state.

“At the same time, Brexit also removed an EU layer of legal and institutional constraint over UK asylum policy, including the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the EU and EU asylum rules.”

How would the UK vote on Brexit now?

All polling comes with a margin of error, and public opinion can change, but recent polls suggest that a clear majority of voters now in principle support the UK rejoining the EU—though it depends on what the terms of rejoining would be.

In the actual referendum in 2016, of course, some 52% of voters chose to leave the EU. But a recent Ipsos poll found public opinion is now about 61% to 39% in favour of rejoining, when you remove the people who said they don’t know, and focus only on likely voters.

This big lead for rejoining is partly because Leave voters are about twice as likely to have changed their minds since the referendum.

In principle, these voters might change their minds back again one day, but there have also been large demographic shifts in the past 10 years. Put simply, older people were always more likely to support Brexit, and they still are today. But as older voters have died and younger people have joined the electorate, there has been a net shift towards support for rejoining.

The impact of this is so significant that the former chairman of YouGov, Peter Kellner, estimated in December 2025 that the change in demographics alone since 2016 suggests that a majority of voters in the UK would now favour EU membership, even if nobody had changed their minds.

And of course the demographic changes continue. As the polling expert Professor John Curtice wrote in an article for the UK in a Changing Europe think tank earlier this month: “The clear implication is that generational turnover could gradually serve to reduce the level of support for being outside the EU even further.”

However, these figures all relate simply to whether there is overall support for rejoining the EU, and when more specific questions about what that might look like are asked, the picture becomes more complicated.

If the UK were to hold another referendum on EU membership, “rejoining” might have a specific meaning that it lacks today—for example, if the government of the time were to have negotiated new terms with the EU. And this might be important.

For example, a YouGov poll this month found that if the UK were about to rejoin, but could only do so if it meant accepting all the EU rules that the UK used to be exempt from such as joining the euro and being part of the Schengen passport-free travel zone, only 35% would support rejoining, with 43% opposed.

How has Brexit affected the UK’s economy?

The economic impact of Brexit was a key topic of debate and disagreement during the referendum, and this has remained the case over the last decade. Tim and Josh told us via Facebook that they wanted to know whether Brexit has increased the UK’s GDP or whether claims it is smaller as a result are correct.

A number of economists and peer-reviewed research papers have estimated Brexit has had a negative impact on the UK’s economy, though the exact scale of this impact is debated, and some other economists have disputed the estimates.

Last week, the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, when asked about the impact of Brexit, said: “I think the level of activity and growth in the economy has been lower. And the reason for that is that if you reduce [...] the size of the markets we trade with, so we reduce our export markets, then that does tend to have a negative impact on growth.”

Mr Bailey said that in his view Brexit’s impact on Britain’s financial markets specifically was “a little bit the other way”, however, adding: “If we go back ten years, people were saying that this would be very bad for the City of London, very bad for Britain's financial markets. Now, I’m not pretending it’s been good, but I would say that I think it has been nowhere near as detrimental as many people predicted at the time [of the referendum].”

Professor Jonathan Portes, Senior Fellow at the think tank UK in a Changing Europe and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at King's College London, said this month that: “Brexit has made the UK economy smaller than it otherwise would have been. The effect has not been a sudden collapse, but a gradual and cumulative drag on trade, investment and productivity.”

A November 2025 study, revised this month, by researchers at King’s College London, Stanford University, the Bank of England, Deutsche Bundesbank, and the University of Nottingham, estimated that by early 2025 the UK’s GDP was 6-8% lower due to Brexit than it otherwise would have been, “with the impact accumulating gradually over time”.

Earlier in 2025, Professor Stephen Millard, a deputy director at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, co-authored a paper with Durham University academics estimating that in the long-run the UK’s GDP would be around 4% lower than if Brexit hadn’t happened, driven by negative productivity due to “the implied increase in the costs of trading” between the UK and the EU.

The investment banking company Goldman Sachs reportedly estimated in February 2024 that the UK’s economy had grown 5% less than comparable countries between 2016 and 2024.

It’s worth noting that some of these estimates rely on or include counterfactual modelling—comparing the UK’s actual economic performance with a modelled version of what might have happened if the UK had remained in the EU. Others have compared the UK’s economic performance to that of other countries.

A key challenge for economists looking at this question is to try to isolate the specific impact of Brexit from other major global events that have affected the UK’s economy since it formally left the EU’s single market and customs union on 31 December 2020—such as the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and conflict in the Middle East.

The Office for Budget Responsibility notes the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and “the stagnation in productivity seen since the global financial crisis” are all factors which mean “it will, in practice, be very difficult to isolate the effect of the new trading relationship with the EU on the medium-term and economic fiscal outlook”.

While there are many economists who argue Brexit has had a negative impact on the UK’s economy overall, it’s not a universal view. Various economists have disputed some of the estimates mentioned above and argued Brexit is having, or will have, a positive impact on the UK’s economy.

Julian Jessop, a fellow at the free market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, said: “Brexit has already started to deliver some benefits, and [...] the longer-term impact should still be positive.”

Professor Patrick Minford, of Cardiff University, disputed the November 2025 research, arguing that some of the comparative countries it used, like Estonia and Greece, “have no basic similarity to the UK economically”, adding: “As the UK’s relative behaviour since 2016 could be due to numerous differential factors at work both here and elsewhere, there is simply no identifying link to Brexit.”

In the first quarter of 2026, the UK’s GDP was 6% higher than its pre-pandemic level (the fourth quarter of 2019). By comparison, US GDP growth was 15.1% over the same period, while the Eurozone’s was 6.6%. Two G7 countries—Japan and Germany—saw lower GDP growth than the UK between these two points.

Did the NHS get that £350 million a week?

One of the biggest claims of the referendum campaign was a slogan on the side of a Vote Leave bus which said: “We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead.”

As we said at the time, the problem with this claim was simple: it didn’t take account of the UK’s rebate, or the money that the EU spent in this country. So the UK didn’t send a net £350 million to the EU, and the money wasn’t available to spend on other things. In 2017, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority called the claim “a clear misuse of official statistics”.

Ten years on, a number of readers, including Mark, Debbie and Mike, asked us via Facebook whether the government did go on to spend an extra £350 million per week on the NHS after Brexit.

This is a reasonable question, but it doesn’t have a simple answer.

Overall, NHS spending has risen significantly. Mark Dayan, Brexit Programme Lead at the health think tank the Nuffield Trust, told us if you look at the change over the years in real terms then “on any reasonable measure, the government is spending far more than £350 million extra a week, if you compare the post-Brexit/post-Covid era with the pre-Brexit/pre-Covid era.” Although the same could have been said before Brexit—or even before the referendum—if you combined several years of spending rises together.

Some have claimed this increase means that Vote Leave’s pledge has been delivered. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former Conservative cabinet minister and senior Vote Leave figure, recently told the Telegraph: “The £350 million was given to the NHS by Theresa May. So the promise was absolutely, unequivocally given.”

It is true that Theresa May announced in 2018 that NHS England spending would be £394 million a week higher in 2023/24 than it was in 2018/19 (in 2018 prices). And she linked this to the fact that the UK would no longer be sending “vast amounts of money to the EU every year”.

But as we wrote at the time (and Dayan also noted) there was no guaranteed extra money—or a “Brexit dividend”, as some called it—to spend as a result of the UK ceasing its contributions to the EU budget after leaving, because other economic costs associated with leaving the EU were expected to outweigh the savings.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies also described talk of a Brexit dividend as “misleading”, arguing that “modest changes to economic growth—and knock-on effects on tax revenues—will quickly outweigh any direct changes to the Government’s budget”. We’ve written more about the overall impact of Brexit on the economy above.

Any assessment of the impact of Brexit on NHS spending is further complicated by the huge increase in spending in both 2020/21 and 2021/22 as the country dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic.

And finally, there are other questions... Did the promise of more money for the NHS mean the NHS in England only, which is what the UK government controls? Or did it include spending on the devolved health services as well? And is a rise in real-terms spending over time even the right thing to look at? NHS spending had already been rising for decades. Does it make sense to assume that the rises after Brexit wouldn’t have happened without it?