Let’s have a proper look at the numbers the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has put on the table. According to her, if you’re standing on a packed Tube or waiting in a queue at Tesco, there’s a statistical chance that one in every 30 people you see rocking up in the UK did so between the summer of 2020 and the middle of 2024. That’s the headline-grabbing soundbite from a net migration figure that clocks in at a whopping 2.5 million over just four years. It’s the gap between the 4.75 million people who decided to make Britain their home and the 2.25 million or so who, for whatever reason, decided to do one.
Now, Mahmood is being very specific about her timeline. She’s looking at the four consecutive twelve-month periods from July 2020 to June 2024, which, rather conveniently for the political narrative, ends just before the general election last July. It’s a period that captures the post-lockdown madness. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the source of all this, and if you do the maths – 4.75 million in, minus 2.246 million out – you land squarely on that 2.504 million figure. The Home Secretary’s “at least one in 30” claim is based on the UK’s population sitting at roughly 69.5 million in mid-2023. That 2.5 million actually works out to about one in 28 people, so she’s being a bit conservative with the “at least” part. It’s a stark illustration of just how much the country’s demographic makeup has shifted in a very short space of time.
We now examine the figures that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has released. She states that, among every thirty individuals you pass on a crowded Underground train or in a Tesco checkout line, one arrived in the United Kingdom between the start of July 2020 and the middle of 2024. This claim rests on a net migration total of 2.5 million during those four years, derived from 4.75 million arrivals minus 2.25 million departures.
Mahmood confines her count to the four successive twelve month stretches that finish in June 2024, a cut off that falls just before the general election of that month and that covers the period after pandemic lockdowns ended. The Office for National Statistics supplies the underlying data: 4.75 million people entered, 2.246 million left, leaving a net increase of 2.504 million. The Home Secretary bases her “at least one in 30” statement on a national population of about 69.5 million at mid-2023. With that denominator, the 2.5 million equals roughly one person in 28 – her “at least” wording understates the ratio. The calculation shows how quickly the national population has changed.
Of course, it wasn’t a steady stream. It was more of a flood, followed by a sudden trickle. In the year to June 2021, as we were still stumbling out of lockdowns, it was a relatively modest 251,000. Then the dam burst. It jumped to 681,000 the next year, peaked at a dizzying 924,000 in the year to June 2023, and then dropped back to 649,000. The latest figures show it plummeting further to just 204,000 in the year to June 2025. So, what caused this massive spike and equally dramatic fall?
Well, it’s a perfect storm of global events and the brilliant political choices made by both the Tories and Labour. First, we had the great post-pandemic travel bounce, with everyone and their dog finally able to move about again. Then there were the shiny new resettlement schemes for people from Ukraine and Hong Kong, a direct consequence of wars and political shifts we were involved in or had a hand in creating. And let’s not forget the post-Brexit immigration system, which was designed to be “points-based” but essentially threw open the doors to the rest of the world to make up for the Europeans we’d just told to get lost. It was a policy triumph.
The subsequent drop is just as instructive. The numbers from those special resettlement schemes inevitably wound down. But the real reason for the plunge is that the government – first the Conservatives and then Labour – finally noticed the sheer scale of what was happening and started slamming the doors shut on foreign workers and students. They introduced rules at the start of 2024 to stop people bringing dependents, and lo and behold, the number of people coming here to work or study from outside Europe has fallen off a cliff. It seems that if you make it harder for people to come, fewer of them do. Who knew? And the cherry on top is that more people have started leaving the UK. Perhaps they’re fed up with the weather, the politics, or the fact that one in 30 of their neighbours just got here. Whatever the reason, it’s all contributed to the numbers coming back down to earth.
