Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has insisted that the government is still looking to reduce immigration numbers, despite official forecasts saying that net migration in 2026 will be higher than previously thought.
The Office for Budget Responsibility [OBR] says that net migration in 2026 will now stand at around 205,000, up from earlier predictions of 129,000.
Hunt has said that immigration will remain important for economic growth, while the OBR has set that it will help “offset slower growth in productivity”.
OBR chief Richard Hughes said that it had expected net migration to fall after the new post-Brexit immigration system was implemented, but this has not happened.
Hughes explained that the UK was still admitting a net level of more than 200,000 people per year, which had forced the OBR to hike up its net migration estimates for four years’ time.
It still predicts that net migration will decrease over the next five years, but by less than anticipated.
To help bring immigration numbers down, Hunt said that the government will invest in upskilling the domestic workforce and providing more training opportunities.
This he said, would reduce the dependence on foreign workers even though the UK would still need a migrant workforce.
To deliver on that, the chancellor pointed out that education has been earmarked as “a big priority” in the Autumn Statement, having allocated an additional £2.3 billion to schools in England.
Hunt’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has separately said that the focus on bringing down net migration “over time” would be focused on preventing some migrants from entering the country illegally.
In support of what Sunak said on the matter, Hunt explained that not addressing illegal migration would lead to reduced public support for the arrivals of legal migrants, which unlike illegal migration would positively benefit the economy and society at large.
Although the OBR’s forecasts published alongside the Autumn Statement showed that Brexit had adversely impacted UK trade, Hunt said that the UK would not be looking to rejoin the EU single market and instead would hope to gradually remove trade impediments to do business more easily with the bloc as an independent nation.
While he conceded that the benefits of being in the single market and “having unfettered trade with our neighbours and countries all over the world” would be “very beneficial to growth”, Hunt said that being part of the single market was not “the right way” for the UK.
The chancellor added that looking to do so would go against “what people voted for” in the 2016 referendum on EU membership but warned that negotiating conditions for easier trading with the bloc from outside would “take time”.
