How much did immigration to the UK rise in the first full year of the Starmer government? Not to get all BuzzFeed circa 2010, but the answer might surprise you. It’s actually a trick question: according to the latest stats from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), published on 21 May, net migration was 171,000 for the year ending December 2025, down from 331,000 in 2024 – a drop of almost half.
According to the annual Immigration Attitudes Tracker published by the think tank British Future, almost half (49 per cent) of people wrongly believe immigration has increased since 2024, with just 16 per cent thinking it has fallen. When broken down by party, 62 per cent of people considering supporting Reform believe immigration has been on the rise (compared to 41 per cent of those favouring Labour), and 67 per cent expected it to rise next year.
Of course, it’s not just overall immigration that politicians and the public are concerned about. But the Home Office figures helpfully published alongside the ONS data reveal other downward trends. In the year ending March 2026, there were 12 per cent fewer asylum claims than in the previous 12-month period. The proportion housed in hotels – a heated issue that has led to protests across the country – has fallen by nearly two thirds (63 per cent) since 2023.
To put it bluntly, this is not where political debate is at right now. On the same day as these stats were published, new Ipsos polling found that immigration is the biggest concern for voters, with the number who think it’s an important issue up nine points since April, to 41 per cent. Regardless of whether you see the government’s immigration policies as justified, on a range of metrics those policies are having their intended effect. But sentiment hasn’t caught up with reality.
This perception gap is baked in to the wider immigration debate. As British Future documents, we tend to wildly overestimate how many people are claiming asylum: “The average estimate is that a third (33 per cent) of all UK immigration is people seeking asylum, with one in five people (21 per cent) thinking that asylum makes up half or more of all immigration.” The actual figure is nine per cent.
Behavioural science has a term for this discrepancy: availability bias. If we can easily picture an example of something – people in lifejackets crowded on to small dinghies, say – our brains have a habit of overstating its likelihood. And it crops up in other areas of public policy. My colleague Anoosh Chakelian wrote last week about “I’ve been lucky” syndrome in the NHS: the tendency for people who have experienced improved waiting times to attribute that to good fortune, rather than the government achieving a key policy aim. It’s depressingly easy to picture patients languishing in hospital corridors, and for that mental image to obscure a personal experience of the NHS actually working well.
It’s also why the insistence that violent crime has been falling steadily in the UK for a decade is so often disregarded. Even when there’s new data, we ignore it: we learned last week that knife robberies are down by more than a fifth since the government took office – but it’s unlikely Labour will get much credit. Meanwhile fraud, turbocharged by AI, is increasing at record rates, but that’s not what people instinctively think of when asked about “rising crime”. A mugger with a knife is a much more visceral image than a nondescript computer screen.
To return to immigration, no government can succeed in a policy area where perception is so dramatically out of step with reality. British Future predicts that, by 2028, net migration could be zero or even negative. We should be preparing now for what that means – for our economy, our universities, our health and social care systems. Instead, the debate is stuck in 2022. Telling people they are wrong is rarely a fruitful political strategy. But next time a political hopeful demands that immigration come down, we should at least see if they know where it’s at now. The answer might surprise us.
[Further reading: No one believes the NHS is getting better]
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