Migration Advisory Committee publishes annual report for 2024

The Migration Advisory Committee has published its annual report for 2024. The letter from the Chair, Professor Brian Bell, to the Home Secretary summarised the report as follows:

The report discusses the government’s intention to link migration and skills policy and recent UK net migration trends. We explore the relationship between migration and skills, noting that increasing domestic skills does not guarantee a reduction in reliance on the immigration system and that the impact of skills investment on immigration will vary by occupation. We also outline the main drivers of recent increases in net migration and discuss the uncertainty around the impact of policies seeking to reduce net migration numbers.

The report provides quantitative estimates of the fiscal impact of migrants. These are the MAC’s first in-house estimates of fiscal impacts and allows a comparison between migrant groups as well as the native population. We find that Skilled Worker migrants at an individual and at a household level are net fiscally positive (partly due to the fact that the immigration rules are designed to allow entry to the highest earning migrants). The development of this methodology will allow us to more fully consider the fiscal impacts of migrants in future commissions.

Separately, the government announced that further resources are being put into the committee to support the additional work they will be doing, including existing staff increasing their hours as well as additional staff being deployed to the committee from elsewhere. The government also reiterated its commitment to introduce an immigration white paper next year, setting out further details of its plan to “reduce legal migration”.