The latest quarterly immigration and asylum statistics have been published and nothing in them felt like much of a surprise really. We know that the asylum grant rate has been dropping, the number of health and care visas dropping, student numbers dropping and we have seen these trends continue in today’s data release.
Asylum
The statistics on asylum are separated into separate pages on number of claims, number of grants, and number of cases in the asylum system. On the number of claims, 2024 saw a record high of 108,138 people claiming asylum in the UK, 84,231 of those were main applicants and 23,907 were dependants. The total was 18% more than in 2023 and 5% more than the previous high of 103,081 in 2002. This is still far below countries in the EU.
The Home Office states that their data suggests that around 20% of people claiming asylum in 2023 held a valid visa within the seven days before claiming asylum. Data is not provided for 2024. Around 32% of the total who claimed asylum in 2024 arrived on a small boat (34,978 people).
The asylum backlog is now comprised almost totally of asylum claims lodged between 28 June 2022 and 22 July 2024 (“post-NABA cases”) and 23 July 2024 onwards (when the regulations were made to get the Illegal Migration Act 2023 cases moving again).
The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 imposed a higher standard of proof on asylum claims, and the Home Office says that this may have contributed to the dramatic decrease in grant rate from 67% in 2023 to 47% in 2024 (do read Colin’s post on the raised standard of roof and human rights claims if you haven’t already).
The grant rates for Syrians in 2024 was 98%. The pause on deciding Syrian claims was put in place in early December last year and so the impact of that is not yet apparent in the data, which shows that 1,853 Syrians were granted protection in the last three months of 2024.
Of particular cause for concern, and as flagged up by us previously, refusals have skyrocketed in Afghan cases with the grant rate in 2024 falling to 53% from 90.5% in 2023 and 96% in 2022. More people were refused (2,050) than granted (1,859) asylum in the last three months of 2024.
As we have been pointing out for a considerable time now, an increase in refusals, particularly poor quality refusals, simply moves the backlog from the Home Office to the tribunals.
The data on irregular arrivals shows that Afghans were in the top five nationalities for all four irregular entry methods. Sudanese nationals were also in top five for multiple irregular methods of entry. Their grant rate was 99% in 2024. There is no alternative route for Sudanese refugees to come to UK.
The Home Office summary on irregular arrivals states that:
Since 2018, 95% of the people arriving on a small boat have claimed asylum. Of the 139,843 small boat arrivals claiming asylum since 2018, just over half (55% or 77,191) had received a substantive decision (as of 24 January 2025, when the data used in this release was taken). Of these, 51,600 had been granted asylum or some other protection status, and 25,591 were refused.
Given the amount of time it takes for an asylum claim to be determined, it seems likely that very few, if any, of those 51,600 people will have naturalised as British citizens yet, meaning that they will be caught by the Home Office’s recent change barring them from British citizenship because of their method of entering the UK.
In better news, in 2024 there were 19,710 people granted family reunion visas to join family members in the UK who have been granted a form of protection status. This is over 10,000 more than in 2023. The Home Office says the increase may be because of the high number of asylum grants at end of 2023 in the previous backlog clearance exercise.
Work routes
The statistics on work routes show that there were 27,174 Health and Care Worker visas granted to main applicants in 2024, this is a huge 81% decrease from 2023. The number of Health and Care Worker visas issued to people working in a Caring Personal Service occupation fell by 91% to 9,539.
Away from the Health and Care Worker route, the number of grants to main applicants on other routes in the Worker category (including Skilled Worker visas) has fallen by 11% since 2023. The areas with the biggest decreases were IT (down by 3,869 or 25%), engineering (down by 1,449 or 23%), and finance professionals (down by 1,106 or 22%).
Grants of ‘Seasonal Worker’ visas in 2024 increased by 9% to 35,561 compared with 2023. Despite concerns about exploitation of those using this route, it has recently been reported that the scheme will be extended for a further five years.
Only 14% of people who arrived on a temporary worker visa still held leave five years later, whereas in the ‘Investor, business development and talent’ visa category, 77% of main applicants held valid leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain after five years.
The number of sponsor licence decisions in 2024 (42,991) was almost identical to 2023 (42,885). Of these decisions, 29,193 were grants (4% fewer than in 2023), and 13,798 were not granted (withdrawn applications and rejections).
Students
In 2024, there were 393,125 sponsored study visas granted to main applicants, 14% fewer than in 2023 and 21,978 visas were issued to student dependants, 85% fewer than the previous year.
EU Settlement Scheme
Applications to the EU Settlement Scheme continue to be made at an average rate of 164,799 per quarter since the deadline of 30 June 2021. A total of 2.3 million applications been made since the deadline up to the end 2024 and 2.1 million of those had been concluded.
67% of those applying to the scheme in 2024 were repeat applications, and the Home Office says that this is driven by a decrease in applications that are late, those that involve derivative rights, and joining family member applications, combined with a growing number of pre-settled status holders reaching the five year continuous residence qualifying period and applying for settled status. Presumably the new automatic upgrade process will have an impact on those repeat applications but we are unlikely to see this for some time.
Family routes
In 2024 the number of partner visas granted decreased by 7%. The Home Office attributes this to the increase in the minimum income requirement that took effect in April 2024, with fewer partners able to meet the higher income threshold. There was a spike in the number of applications before the changes came into force.
Detention and Removals
The total number of enforced returns was 8,164 in 2024, an increase of 28% on 2023 and the first time the number has been back to pre-pandemic levels (it was 7,198 in 2019). The Home Office remains reliant on its ability to remove Albanian and Romanian nationals, as these made up around half of all enforced removals in 2024. The number of Albanians detected arriving irregularly has dropped considerably from its peak in 2022 when 12,658 people arrived, to 616 in 2024, and so the current level of enforced removals of this group may not be sustainable.
There was a large increase in voluntary returns last year, up 24% from 2023 to 25,186. Over half of this were from just three countries: India (6,741), Brazil (4,209) and Albania (2,670). The Albanian figure actually represents a decrease of 265 from 2023, whereas Indian and Brazilian voluntary returns have increased by 67% and 64% respectively compared to the previous year.
The most common reason (only just, at 51%) for a person leaving immigration detention in 2024 was because they were released on bail. However there has been a 51% fall in detainees leaving on bail since 2021, attributed by the Home Office to a near tripling of people leaving detention because they are returned to their country of origin.
Conclusion
We, and others, have been warning of the consequences of these downward trends for a while now. Rushed, poor quality decision making and trying to artificially increase refusals leads to a huge tribunal backlog with a human impact as well as the impact on the cost of asylum support. The drop in health and care workers will mean no one to look after our sick and elderly. Fewer international students means an outsized impact on our universities, which can ill afford to lose that fee income. Yet it all continues.
