The deputy leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice MP, claimed in the Express last month that the current Labour government had “allowed the biggest influx of migrants in British history”. In fact, he said that this is what the statistics show “without a doubt”.
It’s not clear which figures Mr Tice was basing this claim on. We’ve asked him and Reform UK, but haven’t had a response—we’ll update this fact check if we receive one.
The statistics we’ve been able to check—both those available at the time Mr Tice made his claim, and those published since—don’t appear to support it, let alone prove it to be correct “without a doubt”.
And when we asked Oxford University’s Migration Observatory about Mr Tice’s claim, it told us it also wasn’t aware of any statistics which backed it up.
It said: "We cannot identify any data that support the assertion that the current government has been responsible for the biggest influx of migrants in British history, and we are unclear how Mr Tice came to this conclusion."
Politicians should be willing to provide evidence to support the claims they make. If an MP makes a false or misleading claim in a newspaper article, they should make the publication aware of their error so it can take appropriate steps to correct this.
This claim was identified through Full Fact’s AI tools.
What do the statistics say?
There are various different sets of migration data, but one of the most commonly cited is the estimate of long-term international migration published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). We’ve written more about these figures in our net migration explainer.
The most recent such figures cover the year to December 2024, when 948,000 people are estimated to have moved to the UK. (Over the same period 517,000 people left, so total net migration that year is estimated to have been 431,000.)
These figures can’t tell us exactly how many have arrived under Labour, as they cover roughly six months of the last Conservative government and the first six months of Labour. The next set of figures, which will cover the year ending June 2025 and we expect to be published in the autumn, will more reliably tell us about the change under Labour.
But overall the figures for 2024 were significantly down on the year before. In the year ending December 2023 around 1,326,000 people were estimated to have moved to the UK—a record high. (And 466,000 people left, so net migration that year was an estimated 860,000.)
Net migration is estimated to have reached a record high of 906,000 in the year ending June 2023, when 1,320,000 people moved to the UK and 414,000 people left.
So while the ONS migration estimates can’t tell us specifically what the change in the number of immigrants coming to the UK has been under Labour, they appear to suggest that the “biggest influx” of migrants on record so far took place under the previous Conservative government.
The Migration Observatory agrees with that analysis, telling us: “Data clearly show that the 'biggest influx of migrants in British history' took place under the previous administration.”
Projections have suggested net migration is likely to fall considerably during this parliament. (It’s worth noting these projections were published before the government announced new measures aiming to reduce net migration.)
The ONS also publishes more frequent data on arrivals to the UK, though we don’t know how many of these individuals would ultimately be classified as long-term migrants. The most recent statistics show that in the year ending March 2025, 875,000 visas were issued for a “non-visit reason”. Most of these were for work, study, family or humanitarian reasons and there were 38,000 small boat arrivals—none of these categories were at a record high.
What about Channel crossings?
Mr Tice’s claim referred only to “migrants” and did not specify that he was talking about any particular group of migrants, but it’s possible that he intended to refer solely to Channel crossings, which were reported as being at record levels earlier this year.
Between 1 January 2025 and 27 April 2025 (the day Mr Tice’s article was published), government statistics show 9,885 migrants were detected crossing the English Channel in small boats. This is higher than the equivalent periods in other years, going back to 2018 when statistics for this measure began.
This trend has continued since. Between 1 January and 27 May, 13,617 irregular migrants arrived by small boat, higher than equivalent periods in other years since statistics began in 2018.
However these figures don’t support the claim Mr Tice made—firstly because they only refer to a small proportion of all migrants, and secondly because they only look at a very specific period which doesn’t cover Labour’s full time in office.
In the time between Labour forming a government on 5 July 2024 and 27 April 2025, the date Mr Tice’s article was published, 33,127 migrants arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel on small boats, according to government statistics.
This isn’t a record amount. Between 5 July 2022 and 27 April 2023 some 38,600 migrants arrived by small boat.