Kemi Badenoch gave speech on Wednesday referring to James Cleverly’s 2023 visa rule changes, while government says it is important to tackle causes of high migration

Government figures reckon the latest annual net migration figure will be around 500,000, Sam Blewett says in his London Playbook briefing for Politico.

Government officials and the Tories both reckon the ballpark provisional figure will be somewhere around 500,000, well down from that record high of 745,000 in 2022. There will be those who argue the latest figure is massive pretty much whatever it is — but if Starmer is serious about bringing down the numbers, he can thank a suite of measures that would have been much more unpalatable for a left-leaning party to have introduced.

Tomorrow, immigration figures will be released that should show a drop in net migration. This is because of the changes we made in the last year of the Conservative government.

The figures we saw for 2023 were astonishing. They highlighted a big problem we must be honest about. Even if we see a decline in tomorrow’s data, the fact is immigration, both legal and illegal, is too high.

We want to see net migration coming down, but we have to do so in a way that is tackling the causes of net migration, because if much of net migration has been driven by recruiting workers from overseas, you also have to look at what the impact on the economy would be.