We have no clue how many people live in Britain – and Starmer doesn’t care

Maybe I’m too easily surprised. When I last wrote on immigration back in the autumn I said I was “gobsmacked” by the high legal migration figures. Well, I was gobsmacked again this morning when I read this newspaper’s front page, this time on illegal immigration. That as many as one in 12 people in London might be illegal immigrants is already shocking enough. The truth is, though, it might be worse than that.

It’s very difficult to be sure how many illegal immigrants there are in Britain. The Pew Research Centre put the number at 800,000 to 1.2 million in 2017. The consultancy study commissioned by Thames Water and reported this morning estimates the numbers in London based on the earlier study.

The problem is, those numbers are for 2017. The worrying thing is that the real numbers may be higher by now. Illegal migrants mainly come to the UK legally as tourists, to study, or to work, but then overstay their visa, go to ground in their community here, and work in the black economy, unfortunately far from difficult.

So it’s very likely that the explosion in legal immigration in recent years, from exactly those countries where people tend to overstay, has in turn boosted the number of illegals.

It’s difficult to know for sure what’s going on because the Home Office has given up counting. In 2020 they stopped publishing statistics related to exit checks on people leaving the country. They haven’t started them again. So no one outside the Home Office, and possibly no one within it either, actually knows how many people with a visa don’t leave. In each of the four years before 2020 they counted on average 63,000 people with visas who didn’t appear to have left the country. Once again, it’s very likely that figure is now higher.

It’s not difficult to do the maths. Add together the 60,000-plus visa overstayers, the small boat arrivals, and those getting here in some other way, and with deportations running at just 10,000 a year at best, you get a plausible increase in illegals of, say, 75,000 a year. By now, that’s another half million on top of the already uncertain one million figure for 2017. That’s why one in 12 might well now be too low.

Some also say that data held by private companies or public services imply more people are in the country than the official figures say. It’s not implausible. After all, we thought there were three million EU citizens here: it turned out after Brexit there were nearly six million. In 2021 the National Immunisation Service estimated the over-18 population in England at 49.7 million: at the same time the ONS were estimating it to be 44.5 million.

The reality is that we don’t know for sure what the population of the country is, within a couple of million either way – and illegal migration is part of the problem.

How much does this matter? Well, it obviously matters that the British state can’t be bothered to enforce its own rules or to produce minimally reliable statistics. But it’s not only that.

One reason is that planning of any kind becomes much more difficult. For as long as there are no market signals in most of our public services, planning is necessary, but uncertainty in numbers makes it ever harder to assess how many doctors, hospital places, or teachers are needed at any given place or time.

Another is that it matters whether the people who live near you are here legally or illegally. Illegal migrants will be concentrated in particular parts of a city like London. They obviously have no wish to come to the authorities’ attention. It’s hardly surprising if, as a group, they behave differently. They have little incentive to be good citizens or to invest in their neighbourhood. They may be more prepared to tolerate others’ criminality rather than get the police involved. They aren’t going to hassle landlords or complain to their councils. So it’s inevitable that some neighbourhoods start to decline.

Once that starts, in an environment of slow economic growth and high levels of transient migration generally – and let’s not forget that over 40 per cent of London’s population was born overseas, a figure that has doubled in the last 30 years – it easily spreads.

One person who doesn’t seem very bothered about this is Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London. This week he pointedly responded to President Trump’s inauguration by saying that London would always be an open, diverse, and welcoming city, and that “this is your home. You are wanted here.”

But Khan refuses to deal with the practical consequences of his wishes. He doesn’t seem to care about crime or the gradual fraying of social bonds. He’s not interested in policing the streets properly. And he won’t allow housebuilding in the right numbers.

Indeed, his main plan appears to be to massage the numbers by buying up privately rented accommodation and turning it into council housing, which is hardly going to help anyone other than his political clients.

Some look at these numbers, say “there is nothing to be done”, and suggest a general amnesty is the only solution. (In fact, it already is the policy for those here for more than 20 years.) But that would surely just increase the pull factor and make the problem worse: if you have had an amnesty once, it’s hard to credibly say you would never do it again.

Yes it is difficult. There’s no silver bullet. But it’s not good enough just to ignore the problem or leave municipal party bosses to manage it. Nothing is more corrosive to social cohesion, nothing is more damaging to the rights and status of those here legally and contributing to the country, than the sense that large numbers of people are breaking the law and are free-riding on the system.

So we need the Home Office to be honest about what the real situation actually is. We need a deportation programme to be a higher priority, just as it is in President Trump’s America.

And above all, given the way one feeds the other, we need to get legal immigration right down right now. That way, at least, the problem might stop getting worse. But with this Government, I’m not holding my breath.