Conservative Manifesto: Immigration trends

“I was working on this [immigration target] for six years as Home Secretary and we saw the figures start to come down and then they went up again and now they’ve started to come down again.”

• Net migration was estimated at around 273,000 for the year ending September 2016. That’s the difference between the number of people leaving the UK to live elsewhere and the number arriving to live here.
• It’s hard to be precise when talking about what’s happened to immigration in the past—migration figures between 2001 and 2011 are known to have underestimated the number of people coming here. We have new estimates for what net migration might actually have been during those years, but the figures are uncertain.
• The revised data suggests that net migration was around 244,000 in the 12 months to June 2010, during which the Coalition government entered office, lower than it is now.
• Estimated net migration fell to a low of 175,000 in the year to March 2013 before rising to 335,000 in the 12 months before June 2016.
• The latest estimates show net migration falling by 49,000 compared to the year before. This isn’t a big enough change for us to be statistically sure that we are seeing falling levels of net migration but there’s a good chance we are.