Visa grants to live in the UK dropped by a third over the past year driven by a policy clampdown and labour market slowdown, even as asylum applications hit an all-time high, according to Home Office data.
Figures published on Thursday showed 956,000 residence visas were granted in 2024, down 32 per cent from levels in 2023 and 2022.
In the same period, a record 108,000 people claimed asylum, up 18 per cent on 2023 and higher than the previous peak of 103,000 in 2002.
The figures on residence visas — which come as the government weighs options for further policy changes to cut immigration — will reassure ministers that net migration numbers are already set to fall sharply from the record high of 906,000 in mid-2023.
But the rise in asylum applications, after an increase in the irregular arrivals by small boats that voters most dislike, underlines the challenge facing the UK government as it seeks to cut costs in the system and fend off Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.
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Overall visa grants fell mainly because of a sharp drop in visas granted to health and care workers and their families. They declined by 237,000, or 67 per cent, between 2023 and 2024 as a result of more Home Office scrutiny of applications and a ban on care workers bringing family.
Other skilled worker visas fell by 11 per cent between 2023 and 2024, with the biggest drops in IT, engineering and finance. The decline accelerated at the end of 2024, with grants in the second half of the year almost 40 per cent lower than a year earlier.
It is likely to reflect slower hiring across the UK economy, as well as the impact of policy changes, with higher salary thresholds that are pricing out some employers.
Ben Brindle, a researcher at Oxford university’s Migration Observatory, said the “boom and bust” of the past few years still left overall visa grants to non-EU residents well above pre-Brexit levels.
But work-related visas had fallen especially sharply in lower-paying jobs, such as butchers and chefs, he noted, with grants in the food and hospitality sector down 73 per cent year on year in the second half of 2024.
The number of visas granted to overseas students was 14 per cent lower than in 2023, at 393,000, with a bigger drop of 85 per cent in students’ dependants, reflecting the new ban on bringing family.
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However, the figures also showed a sharp rise in the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels since Labour came to power.
Some 38,079 people were being housed temporarily in hotels because of a lack of other Home Office accommodation at the end of December — well below the peak of 56,042 in September 2023 but almost 30 per cent up from 29,600 when Labour won the general election in July 2024.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer vowed to close asylum hotels before winning power by drastically speeding up the processing of asylum claims and slashing the backlog built up under the previous Conservative government.
The pledge has proved much more challenging than anticipated after a rise in the number of people arriving in the UK via small boat Channel crossings.
Immigration minister Angela Eagle conceded last month that the number of asylum hotels in use had risen to 220 from 213 at the time of the election, although the data on Thursday showed more than 22 per cent of asylum applications had been processed within six months, the highest proportion in almost five years.
In the year to September 2024, the UK received the fifth-largest number of asylum seekers in the EU.
The government’s capacity to slash the use of hotels and drastically reduce the backlog of applications will have a knock-on impact on aid received overseas, because a big share of the UK’s Official Development Assistance budget is spent on domestic asylum seekers.
Starmer this week said he would cut the ODA budget from 0.5 per cent of gross national income to 0.3 per cent to fund an increase in defence spending.
This means a much larger proportion of the ODA budget is likely to be taken up by the asylum system in the coming years, unless costs are brought down.
The asylum system cost £5.4bn in 2023-24, up from £4bn in 2022-23, according to Home Office data. Some £4.2bn of the cost last year was covered by the ODA budget.
Separate data from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on Thursday showed that more than 20,500 households were in receipt of homelessness support after being required to leave asylum accommodation provided by the Home Office in the year to September 2024. The figure was 2.5 times as many as in the year to September 2023.
