Responding to the latest net migration figures released this morning, IPPR are calling for the government to rethink their migration target.

IPPR believe that the current net migration target is masking more complex migration trends between flows and does not allow people to understand transience (population movement) and concentrations of migrants in local areas to better manage pressures on local services and communities. Net migration and asylum should be given different targets to reflect the government’s different priorities. The figures released today by the Office for National Statistics reveal that net migration to the UK (the difference between immigration and emigration) is an estimated 336,000 in the year ending June 2015, the highest level on record and more than three times the government’s target. The increase in net migration is due to both an increase in net EU migration – particularly due to immigration from the ‘old’ EU member states – and an increase in net non-EU migration.

While there was an increase in asylum applications by 19% in the year ending September 2015 compared to the year before, asylum makes up only around 5% of total inflows and the UK receives significantly fewer asylum applications than Germany, Hungary, Sweden, Italy and France. Phoebe Griffith, associate director migration, integration and communities at IPPR, said: “The net migration target has both failed on its own terms and left Britain unable to respond effectively to humanitarian crises and the real and complex needs in our labour market. Shifting to a more disaggregated system would enable us to use migration policy in the national interest.

As a first step towards this, the government should create separate targets for net migration (excluding asylum) and asylum. At the moment the government has pledged to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020, but still includes these figures in its net migration target. To reflect the government’s different priorities for migration and asylum, they should be separated in the net migration figures and allocated different targets.”