The Government Has No Idea Who is in Britain

 Thousands of migrants who came here legally on work or student visas overstay and purposefully slip into illegality. The state’s ability to track them seems non-existent. They could be anywhere, doing anything – and Whitehall wouldn’t know.

Just a month ago, the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee found the Home Office had accidentally opened Britain’s doors to record levels of migration. Officials “made changes to the Skilled Worker visa route without a full assessment of the risks or potential impacts, including the risks of non-compliance with visa rules and exploitation of migrant workers.”

Those “risks of non-compliance” are no longer hypothetical – they are happening. The Committee’s report urged civil servants to do more to monitor compliance when visas expire.

Shocking as this is, it’s hardly surprising. The British state has only the vaguest idea of how many people live in the UK – legally or otherwise. The evidence is everywhere. There are 63.8 million patients registered with GP practices in England, but according to the ONS the entire population is 58.6 million. During Covid, some local health areas even managed the mathematically miraculous feat of vaccinating more than 100% of their population.

We saw the same blind spot during Brexit: the campaign group ‘the3million’ was so named because it was thought there were three million EU citizens in Britain. The real number? Closer to six million....<<<Read More>>>...