In May Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced measures which he said would ensure net migration falls "significantly" over the next four years. The new figures make little change to the overall estimate of net migration to the UK between 2021 and 2024, falling slightly from 2.6 million people to 2.5 million in the revised report. Based on that method, the ONS now thinks that 257,000 British nationals left the UK in 2024 while 143,000 Britons living abroad returned. Using that method such a person would usually be counted as an emigrant, skewing migration figures. The ONS has stopped using this method to measure EU migration, instead of using visas and border data shared by the Home Office.

Source: The Times November 19, 2025 09:09 UTC