The Stats of the Nation: Immigration, benefits and inequality

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The history bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to this special series of more or less. With me, Tim Halford. Every day this week, we've been casting our more or less eye over a few of the statistical conundrums facing the UK. We've made it to Friday, and you know what that means. It's time for us to take a trip to our desert island. On today's programme, we're going to give you a cut out and keep guide to three of the big questions that might well play a part in the political debate on our wonderful island in 2026. We'll unpack benefit spending, explore inequality, and to begin with, we're going to tell you some useful numbers on immigration. (music playing) My more or less cast away today is the migration analyst, Madeline Sumption, which kind of fits, right? She's the director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, a regular radio for interviewee, and most importantly, a friend of the programme here on more or less. And I've no doubt she has an incredible back story, but with not really desert island discs, they won't even let us use the music. So let's talk about immigration. And let's start with a question from loyal listener Emma, who asked us to look into the authenticity of a claim that she read in the telegraph. That claim is net migration accounted for nearly 98 percent of the growth in the UK's population last year. Official figures show. Or when the claim was made last year was 2024. And Madeline, I know some interesting immigration figures have come out since the email arrived in our inbox. But just looking over the last few months, is that claim about right? Yes, it is. The official projections from the Office for National Statistics suggest that over the next few years, net migration was due to make up 98 percent of overall population growth. Now that precise figure obviously depends on what net migration is and we've just seen a big decrease. But that actually doesn't change the overall picture, which is that if the Office for National Statistics is right, that natural change, the number of births over deaths, is going to be negative after 2030, then actually in the future going forward more than 100 percent of population growth is going to come from net migration. So the UK population is projected to shrink slightly without the impact of net migration. Let's talk about recent trends in migration. So going back the last five years, going back to the pandemic, there have been some very dramatic results come in at the end of 2025. So what's been happening? Well, we've been on a bit of a roller coaster with overall migration trends. What happened was after Brexit, which was widely expected to reduce migration, we actually saw a tripling of the net number of people coming to the UK, which went up from a figure that before the pandemic, before Brexit had been in the order of 200, 300,000, that then went up to more than 900,000 at the peak in 2022, 2023. And then the government imposed a bunch of restrictions, particularly on work and study visas, and the numbers plummeted down a bit. And so we have now an official estimate for the year ending June 2025, which is the first full year after the previous government's restrictions we introduced, of just over 200,000. So that's, I mean, not dramatically below where it was pre-Brexit, but it's very dramatically below the recent peak. Can you break down those numbers for us? Is there a sensible way to break them down in terms of, well, there are people on work visas, there are people on family visas, there are people seeking asylum? Yes, so the main four categories are basically people coming for humanitarian reasons or through the asylum system. You've got people on work visas, study visas, and people coming as family members. Now, if you look at the number of people immigrating to the country, so forget about immigration for a moment, then the biggest reasons by far tend to be work and study. But those are not necessarily the people most likely to stay. The people who are most likely to stay are people who are coming here as family members of British citizens or as refugees. So you get a slightly different picture. And if you look at the net figures, then effective, you've got a much larger contribution from refugees and particularly people coming through the asylum system, a larger contribution from family migrants. Can we say anything sensible about the economic impact of different kinds of people coming to the country? We can, particularly if we're looking at the impact on public finances because that's one of the economic factors that's, I think, most easy to quantify. And there, the really crucial question is, are people working and what kind of work do they do? And so what we see is that you have some groups of migrants people coming on skilled work visas in the private sector, for example, are going to have very positive impacts on public finances. On the other end of the spectrum, you have groups that really struggle in the labour market like refugees where we tend to see much lower employment rates and then when people are working, they're much more likely to be working in low-weight jobs where they may have a significant entitlement to in-work benefits. Any sense of when we add all of these very, very different people together what the total impact is? This is actually really tricky to work out because there are some groups where we don't have a lot of data on precisely what they're doing. Overall in the past, if you go back several years and look at some of the old studies, they tended to suggest that the total impact on public finances was relatively small, either positive or negative, depending on the methods that they used. As we gradually get better data to make these estimates, I think what we may find is that the public finances impact of migration in the last couple of years has become less favourable because there's been a significant increase in the share of overall migration that is made up of asylum seekers who tend to be the ones who struggle most in the labour market. Right, that's all fascinating. I have to say, gaining an increasing appreciation of the Desert Island discs format gives us a little breather, we could listen to a bit of music, so Madeline, what is disc number one? Actually, before you tell me, I'm afraid we can only use music for copyright reasons. So do you have a particular genre of elevator music, your favour? Well, I do like a good corporate lift and I think that the best kind of music is maybe some light jazz. That was some generic light jazz chosen for copyright reasons by my guest, Battle Insumption. Let's get back to more or less. Madeline, there were a few migration arguments swirling around in politics and in the media in 2025. And I'd love to try to pull out a few numbers that might make those debates a little bit less heated and a little bit more informed. So let's start with indefinitely to remain, or sometimes called ILR, just explain to us what that is. So this is basically permanent status in the UK. Most people arrive on temporary visas and then they will be on that visa for some period of time, usually at least five years. And then if they meet the criteria, they can apply to be hit permanently. So it's a permanent status that they don't have to renew. They can lose it if they leave the country for long enough, but generally it's considered permanent and it's one step before citizenship. And various politicians have said they are going to change the rules on indefinitely to remain, making it harder for people to get that status or also harder for them to convert the status into citizenship. I'm curious though. Do we know how many people in the UK currently have indefinitely to remain? So there's no official record of the number of people who hold ILR, partly because some of the people who got it will have done that decades ago when the record keeping was not particularly thorough. But if you triangulate various different data sources, then it looks like for non-EU citizens, we probably have a figure in the high hundreds of thousands, maybe in the order of six to eight hundred thousand. Right, which is about one percent of the UK population? Yes, that's right. Now, crucially, it doesn't include EU citizens who have also have indefinitely to remain, but they've got slightly different legal situation because of the withdrawal agreement with the European Union that governs their status after Brexit. There are around actually four million people who have been granted permanent status under that post-Brexit settlement scheme. But it's not clear how many of those people are actually still in the country as possible that a fair number have left. Given that all of these people presumably had to fill in some form and get some stamp of approval and we still don't know how many there are, I hesitate to ask how many people are in the UK working illegally, but I'm sure there is an estimate. So what do we know about that? We don't know that much. There have been some estimates over the past few years. They are now mostly quite old. So there were some estimates for the period in around 2017, which suggested that the total number of people living in the UK without authorisation was in the high hundreds of thousands. But that was a long time ago. I would imagine that the figures have increased since then for various reasons, but including having more people who've applied for asylum and been refused, but not left the country. If you're interested in the illegal workforce in particular, then that we just have no sense of at all. There are no reliable estimates and how many of those people who are in the UK without permission are working. OK, one more attempt to get a number. Maybe we have a better number on this. How many people claimed asylum? The number of people claiming asylum has gone up a fair amount over the last five or ten years, and it reached record high levels of just over 100,000 in the past year. Now, we know a fair amount about them. The largest number of people arrived on small boats. That's the route that everyone knows about. But they were actually only slightly smaller number of people arriving on visas. So this would often be a work visa, study visa, or a visit visa, and then claim asylum. This has been one, I think, one of the most difficult issues for the government to manage because the numbers of people applying have been so high. Even though they're making a lot of decisions, we've developed this big backlog of people who are still waiting for their asylum decisions. So what is the current state of that backlog? Is there any sign of it improving? There are basically two backlogs. So we have the backlog of people waiting for initial decisions which has been improving over time and currently stands at around 80,000 people in September 2025. The big challenge for the government is that when people get refused at that initial decision stage, then they have a right to appeal. And that has created a new backlog in the courts, which is actually a little bit harder operationally for them to deal with. So there's another 50,000 or so cases in the courts. And the government has various proposals to try and reduce that number to try and streamline the system and make decision making faster. But we'll see how those pan out. Thanks to our castaway Madeleine's assumption. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Loyal listener Norman got in touch to ask us about a claim he heard on the world at one last year. Tim Montgomery of reform claimed that the UK benefits bill is much higher than other European countries. Is that true? Here's what Tim Montgomery actually said. We have a level of claimant at the moment. A level of claiming benefits in Britain. That's out of line with almost every other Western country. So is that true? How does the cost and claimant count of the UK compare to similar countries? Lucas Lena is an assistant professor at the University of Edinburgh and an expert on the international comparison of welfare data. So first up, do we have a good data source to compare benefit systems? There's actually quite a lot of work going into comparing welfare spending across countries, in particular at the OECD where I've previously rocked that. And for this, we have quite good statistics. Welfare spending in general, including pensions and the NHS amounts to 23% of UK GDP, lower than France and Germany, higher than the US and Canada. But that's probably not what people generally think of as welfare payments. More often they're thinking about unemployment benefits or working age in capacity benefits. So let's dive in, starting with unemployment benefits. The UK spends extremely low on unemployment benefits. One of the least spend across high-income countries with just about 0.1% of its GDP, whereas continental European countries typically spend around three to five times as much as the UK. And that is because the UK does not really have unemployment benefits that are a proportion of previous wages. So the job-seeker allowance is really just a small fraction of what most high-income countries provide in terms of unemployment benefits that typically provide 60% to 70% of the previous wage, often for up to a year after one loses their job. Right, okay, so that's a very different system. What about incapacity benefits for people of working age? Again, what is the UK doing? How is that changed and how does that compare to other countries? So for disability and incapacity benefits, the UK is less of an outlier. It used to be still below the average of high-income countries with around 1.3% of GDP going to social spending and disability and incapacity benefits. But it has actually caught up in the recent years more towards European levels of currently 1.7% of GDP. And this is largely driven by an increase in claims not by an increase in generosity, which is lower than most countries. So the claim-encounter for working age incapacity benefits has increased for the UK, especially since the pandemic, from around 2.2 million people to currently up to 3.8 million people. Those are the latest claim-encounter figures from the government, by the way, not the spending figures from the OECD, which are a bit older. That is an increase that is larger than in other countries, but not unique. So we had a very similar development in France, for instance, in parallel. So assuming Tim Montgomery was talking about working age disability spending, his claim does not appear to be backed up by the data. With the increase in claimants over the past few years, the UK has caught up to around the average of high-income countries spending on disability benefits. Now, part of this increase may be driven also by the very low spending on the job seekers allowance on unemployment benefits, which leads to some substitution of people aiming to replace it with disability benefits. Yeah, if you can't get paid some kind of unemployment benefit and you realise how I hang on a mic qualified for disability benefits instead, then it makes sense that some people would find that tempting. Absolutely. So the second reason for the increase is driven by mental health conditions that primarily concerns young people, often in their 20s, particularly after the pandemic, where the number of claimants for the personal independence payment increased from around 700,000 to about double the number, 1.4 million claimants for mental health conditions. But this increase also occurred for other reasons, such as musculoskeletal or cancer-related conditions, which makes me think that the rise is not limited to hard-to-assess conditions since we've seen similar growth for, say, cancer survivors in claimants. That is to say that over this time period, there's been similar growth in other disability groups. But for mental health, Lucas says the number looks very big because you're starting from a bigger base. And just looking again at this claim that has been circulating in the UK, that there is a level of claiming benefits in Britain that is higher than almost every other Western country. Is there any indicator on which that claim is true? So it is true that the UK experienced a steeper increase in disability claimants than most other countries over the past, say, five years since the pandemic. France experienced quite similar increase, so there are other countries that one can compare with similar developments, but the UK still experienced one of the steepest increases. But with such low-generosity levels, that it is still not materialising in high spending on disability benefits. Be in no doubt the cost of disability benefits is going up and will cost the government several billions more in the years ahead. But compared to other countries, our bill is not the highest. Our thanks to Lucas Leena. How unequal is the UK? If you were listening to politicians on the left last year, you might well think that inequality is out of control in the UK. Here's Green Party leader Zach Polanski talking to Evan Davis on PM. I often get called as radical and I would say what is radical right now is the status quo, the inequality that is in our society where poor people are getting poorer and rich people are getting richer. But is that true? There are all kinds of measures which analyse the size of the gap between rich and poor in a variety of ways. You can look at income and you can look at wealth. Let's start with income. Aaron Advani is Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation and a Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick. If you look back over the last few decades, income inequality in the UK has been by kind of standard measures either pretty static or maybe rising very slightly. So if you take a measure like the genie coefficient, which is a hard one to explain this and how it's constructed, but it's trying to put together all of the information and pilot together, it looks relatively flat. But the genie coefficient is just one way of looking at inequality. Some academics point out that while it does include everyone, it means that quite large changes at the extremes of the income distribution, such as among the very rich, don't move the genie coefficient around as much as you might expect. If you try to have a measure that's more sensitive to what's happening at the edges of the distribution, so sometimes people use the concentration of income, much of all of the income in the economy goes to say the top 1%. Then you say, "Okay, well, that number has actually been rising a bit, not hugely, but it has been rising for pre-tax income inequality rose from about 12 and a half percent back in the late 90s to closer to 14 and a half percent by 2023." How does the UK compare to our peer countries, the European countries, for example, or the US? Yeah, so if you compare to European peers, we're a bit sort of worse if you think inequality is a bad thing, so France is more like 11%, Germany's 13%, Italy's about 9%, again, depends a bit which year you use. No other Western European country is higher than us, and most are a bit lower. At the other end, the US is quite a lot higher. There's a lot of disagreement over the US one. There's the competing numbers that different people have, but all of them sort of put a degree as the high teens, maybe 18%, some go up as far as 20%, as the share of income goes to the top 1%. These figures are pre-tax, and the tax in benefit system does make a difference to the top 1% share for the UK. The post-tax measure of inequality is unsurprisingly lower in the sense that the tax system is redistributing money from hiring people to lowering people, and so the top 1% share, if you were looking, post-tax is more like high-ten, low-level, so 10.7% in 2023, but again, varies a bit year and year. And that's actually been relatively flat. It compared to 14.5% for the pre-tax measure. And that 10.5-ish number has been actually relatively constant, so it's similar to actually what it was in 1927. That's not quite the end of the story, because at this point, we hit something strange about the data set. I think we're kind of confident that measure is not an accurate measure of what we should think of as true income in some sense. So far, we've been talking about the trends from income data, but to a quirk of accounting, not all income is counted. The big one is capital gains. The tax you pay when you sell an asset for more than you bought it for, say if your shares in a business go up in value. So capital gains are really concentrated, so that more than half of all capital gains are given year, go to about 5,000 people. What does the trend in income inequality in the UK look like, including capital gains? When you're capital gains, income inequality in the UK is higher and has been rising faster than when you ignore capital gains. So we said that in the late 90s, the top 1% share of income was about 12.5%. Instead, if you can include capital gains, it was higher at 14%. When you think about how that's changed over time by 2023, that 12.5% top 1% share for income had risen to 14.4%. Instead, when you're through capital gains that has actually gone up to more like 17, 18%. Not a trivial sum of money in the end. No, it means that the top 1% share is quite a lot higher accounting for gains. And it's the capital gains tax because it's lower than income taxes. The tax system is doing less work to try to redistribute that kind of income. Well, this brings us towards the topic of wealth. Wealth obviously is adjacent to income, but it's not the same thing. What sort of measures do we have of wealth inequality? So wealth inequality, if you look across sort of the swiftest time, if you go back sort of 100 years to the end of the Victorian era, wealth inequality was extreme to a kind of level that people find really astonishing. The top 1% had something like 70% of wealth. So 7 in every 10 pounds worth of wealth belonged to just 1% of the population. The top 10% had only 90% and this is a big decline. This dramatic decline that happened around World War I and it sort of fell over the course of the 1900s, so that by the early 80s, the top 1% had gone down from 70% to only 14%. So what we're describing is a process where the wealth held by the richest 1% fell from 70% of the national wealth. It in 1900 to about 14% now. Is that process continuing or has there been some flattening off or a bounce back? Yeah, so there's been a bit of a bounce back since then. If you take well survey data and correct to some of the measurement issues that we know about house prices and top wealth and so on, it's probably more like 20% now rather than the 14% it was at the low. Thanks to Aaron Advani. We've nearly reached the end of our series of special programs and we've looked in our somewhat random, moral-ess way at the place the UK finds itself in. We've talked about many of the things that the UK public care about the most and many of those things are not quite going according to plan. As 2026 progresses, many of the things we've spoken about are going to lead to public concern and we're going to end with a kind of warning on the national mood because you, dear listener, you're not in a good place. Alex Skolls is the research director at Natsen, the organisation that runs the BSA or British Social Attitude Survey. It's a gold standard survey that's been tracking the mood of the nation since 1983. One of the things we've found is that people have low levels of trust and confidence in the political system in the UK at the moment. You see? Typically and historically, British Social Attitude Data is shown that general elections have helped to restore trust and confidence in the system. People have their voices heard at the ballot box, governments are held to account and then trust and confidence in the system tends to rally somewhat. But this effect is also gradually diminished over time and the 2024 election had no positive impact on the level of trust and confidence in Britain at all. So only 19% think the system of governing Britain needs little or no improvement and just 12% said that they trust governments to put the interests of the nation above those of their own party just about or ways almost of the time, a record low. Alex says this lack of confidence in the government is linked to people's feelings about their own finances, which we talked about in the first episode of this series. Yeah, so we ask a question about how people are feeling about their current household income. So 26% said that they're struggling on their current household income. That's again at one of the highest levels that we've recorded. Only 35% say that they're living comfortably. That's the lowest that we ever recorded on the British Social Attitude Survey since 2010. 2010 is just when they started asking that question by the way. So there's a widespread sense in Britain that people are struggling to make hence me. And the general mood of dissatisfaction extends to the health service which we spoke about in our second programme. A record 59% said they are dissatisfied with the NHS and over half of us said that we were dissatisfied with social care. Again, those are record levels of dissatisfaction. So the year ahead is likely to see a population that is running out of patients, bashing its head against a state that requires exactly that, which might not be that much fun if you're a politician caught in the middle. Although that probably depends if you're in power or not. But fear not. We at More or Less will be here to help you understand what's going on a little more clearly. And if you have questions, of course, please email more or less at bbc.co.uk. We will be back on Wednesday in our usual slot. And until then, goodbye. More or less was presented by me, Tim Halford, the producer was Tom Coles, with Nathan Gower, Charlotte McDonald, Lizzie McNeil and Katie Solveld. The programme was recorded by Sarah Hawkely, and the series was mixed by James Beard, Neil Churchill and Sarah Hawkely. The production coordinator was Maria Ugundeli, and our editor is Richard Faden. Hi, I'm Phil Wang, and this is a podcast to podcast trailer for a different podcast than this podcast that you've listened to, or are going to listen to. But nonetheless, I'm talking about another podcast that you should also definitely listen to. The podcast I'm talking about is Comedy of the Week, which takes choice episodes from BBC sitcoms, sketches, podcasts and panel shows, including my own show Unspeakable, and puts them all into one podcast. Maybe I'll trail this podcast on that podcast, who's to say? I'll do what I like. Listen to Comedy of the Week now on BBC Sounds. Podcast. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.