WILL JONES
London is home to as many as 585,000 illegal migrants, equivalent to one in 12 of the city’s population, according to a previously confidential report. The Telegraph has the story.
There is mounting concern over the failure to control Britain’s borders and the pressure that places on public services such as schools and the NHS. The use of illegal migrants in the black economy, working in roles such as food delivery drivers, is also a concern.
Despite this, no official figures on the scale of the problem are provided by the Home Office.
The new estimate has emerged in a study commissioned by Thames Water, obtained by the Telegraph under freedom of information-style laws for the environment.
In total, there are estimated to be more than one million illegal migrants in the UK, with 60% of those in the capital.
The report suggests most illegal migrants arrived in the UK on work, study or visitor visas and then overstayed.
Migration experts suggested that the figures could be an underestimate as some of the underlying data dates from 2017, before the surge in migrants crossing the Channel.
On Tuesday, the Home Office confirmed 1,000 migrants had crossed so far this year, following 38,816 in 2024, the second highest total on record.
Chris Philp, the Shadow Home Secretary, said the figures in the report were “deeply alarming”.
“Having lost control of illegal immigration over the Channel, the Labour Government must now urgently start deporting far more illegal immigrants,” he said.
“It is totally unacceptable to have these numbers of illegal immigrants in the UK. The law needs to be looked at so that spurious human rights, modern slavery and asylum claims cannot be used to delay or prevent removals of illegal immigrants.”
Alp Mehmet, Chairman of think tank Migration Watch, said: “A population underestimate on this scale has colossal implications for utility and local authority planning. Utilities, housing, the NHS, GP surgeries and schools will all come under severe pressure, further risking community cohesion.”
The Telegraph has previously revealed accusations that the NHS is giving undocumented migrants priority for appointments and at A&E, as the health service continues to battle to bring down waiting lists.
Richard Tice, the Deputy Leader of Reform UK, said: “One in 12 people in London are here illegally, probably working illegally using taxpayer-funded public infrastructure and services. It is totally unacceptable.
“It’s another reason why we need to properly control our borders.”
Worth reading in full.
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The news that one in 12 people in London is an illegal migrant is likely to be an under-estimate
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.
The Telegraph: continue reading
Featured image: behance.net
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