Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Josquius]

Debatable we are at the liberal end. Maybe in the middle I'd say. Spain is easier I know for sure.
 I think Belgium tightened theirs up some years ago as they were the old football manager cheat.
A few others from what I gather are easier than Britain. The costs in the UK are very high and pretty sure 5 years is fairly common whilst we demand 6.

I don't think it's too big of a pull factor anyway.
There's a huge amount of ignorance about the system here. Lots of belief if a kid is born in Britain they're automatically British thus having a kid is a way to quickly gain permanent right to stay.

[The Brain]

Caerphilly Castle is lovely.

[Sheilbh]

What you have on both sides of the ocean is a engineered policy failure.

The underlying fundamentals are declining working age populations in the OECD world and mounting shortages in key areas of the labor market.  AI isn't going to pick strawberries or tend lawns or fill the construction trades or help care for grandma.

All the OECD countries are going to need a good deal more legal immigration if they want to keep their economies running in an orderly way.  We are seeing this in the US where the Trumpers are making quiet compromises on farm and hospitality labor. 

The legislatures aren't passing laws to allow the necessary expanded immigration in a rational controlled way, because of the nativist veto.  But the powerful push-pull forces remain, so people are going to come, proper documented or no.  Hence the resort to extra-legal measures.

In the US at least, I fear that the way this plays out is the economy tips over into severe recession once the AI bubble bursts, exposing the weak fundamentals underneath.  Maybe at that point the political cycle tips back left and coercive measures go away, but at that point immigration is controlled because the push-pull dynamic isn't there anymore. 

In Europe harder to say because different political and economic factors for each country.  But in much of Europe the demographic decline is even more severe.

I'm not sure that's the case in the UK.

I've mentioned it before but the immigration system was significantly liberalised under Johnson in 2020. They lowered the skills and salary thresholds, with even lower thresholds for shortage occupations or migrants with certain academic backgrounds (and no thresholds at all for the NHS or education sector). That government also got rid of any quotas/caps and removed all resident labour market tests. Lawful migration was significantly expanded.

Jonathan Portes an economist who is broadly supportive of these changes (and not an keen on either Brexit or Johnson) has estimated that approximately about half of all full-time jobs could qualify for a visa. This is a significant increase - again his estimate is probably a doubling compared to the previous system. Comparing immigration systems is difficult but his analysis is that it is "considerably more liberal with respect to non-European migrants than that of most EU member states" in particular because they normally have higher skill or salary thresholds and often have resident labour market tests.

Obviously at the same time Brexit happened, so again in his description: "it rebalances the system from one which was essentially laissez-faire for Europeans, while quite restrictionist for non-Europeans, to a uniform system that, on paper at least, has relatively simple and transparent criteria, and covers up to half the UK labour market."

The changes happened in 2020, but so did covid. So the impact of those changes were delayed until 2022 and there was a lot of exceptional covid migration, as well as the Ukrainian and Afghan settlement schemes and the Hong Kong route. But that liberalisation has had an impact:


While there are those exceptional aspects in those numbers, the overwhelming majority are actually a big increase in economic migrants through the expanded lawful routes. As Jos says costs are high in international comparisons but the system itself is fairly open.

Rates are falling - in part because those temporary factors (particularly covid and Ukraine scheme) stabilised. But also Sunak started tightening Johnson-era rules, Starmer is now tightening them further. I don't think that level of 1,000,000 net migration per year is sustainable (especially in a country that builds 150,000 homes a year and is contemplating water rationing because we've not built a reservoir in 30+ years).

But I think there is actually support or a higher level of migration than in the 2010s or 2000s. However it is hugely undermined by the very visible lack of control of the border presented by images of people getting off boats landing on beaches along the south coast. I also think more long term that if we're having net migration of higher than say 300,000 - then we probably need to increase house-building significantly from 150k per year, unless we're assuming a large proportion of migrants will enter into throuples.

We need the other infrastructure too.

But I agree I think how it works in Europe does vary by country but there are common threads in the politics. And I actually think it gets to one of the challenges for the EU which is the common border/Schengen area - I think that is coming under increasing pressure. This is only anecdotal but in the last year I've crossed into Germany by train twice (from France and Poland) in both cases the train was delayed for almost an hour as we had to stop at the first town after the Germany border while police checked the passports/travel documents of everyone on the train. That is new in recent years. At the same time Frontex is the fastest growing bit of the EU (and the first uniformed service at a European level) and there are challenges for the border countries - so I think there is an inherent tension of various national immigration and citizenship policies, with a European citizenship and common border.

Debatable we are at the liberal end. Maybe in the middle I'd say. Spain is easier I know for sure.
 I think Belgium tightened theirs up some years ago as they were the old football manager cheat.
A few others from what I gather are easier than Britain. The costs in the UK are very high and pretty sure 5 years is fairly common whilst we demand 6.

All of what I'm saying here is about standard settled in a country and acquiring citizenship via naturalistion. There are lots of exceptions and easier routes (including in the UK) for if you marry or have partner or child with citizenship, lots of European countries also have passports by descent which the UK doesn't really do (my understanding is that the countries with the most open rules for citizenship by descent tend to be those who experienced mass emigration in the 19th and 20th century like Ireland and Italy, which makes sense).

Spain is not more liberal it requires ten years of residence which is at the top end of Europe.

We are five years of permanent residence, which is as low  as anyone else in Europe (France, Portugal, Bulgaria, Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium - and, for now, Germany but Scholz introduced that and I understand Merz is now returning it to the previous system). The only country with a more open system is Malta where you can acquire citizenship after just one year and for a small donation of one million Euros - but I think the CJEU has ruled that is illegal and basically selling citizenship (which it is). Aside from that the rules for most of those countries are broadly pretty similar - some have tests on assimilation (we don't), some have language tests (we do), some have some form of test on "living in x country" (we do). I think we're closest to France.

And while our immigration fees are high by international comparisons, the citizenship stuff actually isn't. So all told I think the test and administrative process (including the ceremony) is around £1,800 - that's not a million miles from France which is about €1,500 for administration and the appropriate tests.

I think all of that is reflected by the fact that the UK grants new citizenship to more people than any other European country.

I don't think it's too big of a pull factor anyway.
There's a huge amount of ignorance about the system here. Lots of belief if a kid is born in Britain they're automatically British thus having a kid is a way to quickly gain permanent right to stay.

Yeah the rules on this have changed a lot over the years. Although I'd flag that right to abode and citizenship aren't necessarily the same thing. A child may have the right to abode in the UK but not citizenship automatically (I think it's normally 5 years) - and there's a lot of case law on this that is pretty favourable to acquiring a permanent right to stay if there's any children (this is often the source of cases bigged up by Home Secretaries and tabloids - I'm 90% sure Theresa May's story of someone's deportation being blocked by the courts because they had a pet cat was an Article 8 right to family life case where the court cited the pet cat as an indicative factor of someone's settled family life).

Kemi Badenoch is an example of the confusion because of the changes over the years - she was born in the UK when we did have birthright citizenship but then moved to Nigeria as a baby and only returned to the UK as a teenager as the family were apparently not aware that she had British citizenship until they investigated it as the economic and political situation in Nigeria went south.

[garbon]

Minor quibble but it is 5 years of permanent residence to get ILR. Unless you have a special dispensation such as a British partner, you then need to wait a full year after getting that status to become a citizen. So I'd say Jos's 6 years is accurate.

After fees for visas (including the ever increasing NHS surcharge) and ILR, one has paid a pretty penny. Feels slightly odd to set those aside when looking at the overall cost to acquire citizenship.

[Josquius]

Spain is also only 2 years for their main immigrant group - Latin Americans.

You say French citizenship is pretty expensive.... From what I've seen many others aren't.

[Sheilbh]

Minor quibble but it is 5 years of permanent residence to get ILR. Unless you have a special dispensation such as a British partner, you then need to wait a full year after getting that status to become a citizen. So I'd say Jos's 6 years is accurate.

After fees for visas (including the ever increasing NHS surcharge) and ILR, one has paid a pretty penny. Feels slightly odd to set those aside when looking at the overall cost to acquire citizenship.

Fair point on both - with the first bit that is common across Europe that you hold residence for a minimum period before it starts to count towards acquiring citizenship. So all of those comparable residency periods will be after any applicable minimum period (for example, for non-EU people France is also basically has one year plus five).

On fees, I agree the UK are very high in comparison with the rest of Europe (especially the IHS), but the costs of naturalisation. I suppose I separated because we were talking about citizenship and it' not necessary in the way that visas or the IHS are - but I take the point.

Spain is also only 2 years for their main immigrant group - Latin Americans.

On an aggregated level, but not the for their largest immigrant group who need ten years - Moroccans.

[Sheilbh]

Please.

Either this happens all the time and the country is full of dangerous criminals (and thus the far right is right to be all up in arms) or this was deliberate sabotage. Because what are the chances of a national-news material person getting released by accident?

I get this is their job, but prison workers unions says the manager who accidentally released him is being scapegoated.

The Chief Inspector of Prisons has also said the sector is in "chaos" and mistakes happen "all the time". He noted the official figures show about 250 prisoners were accidentally released in the year to March 2025 which is double the previous year. But they cautioned that there are "serious anomalies" in two other category B prisons (HMP Pentonville and Birmingham). In fact they said this case was high profile so attracted attention but they were more concerned about the stuff that's just going on routinely and under the radar.

It does feel sub-optimal that the prison service is accidentally releasing someone every working day...

Edit: It sort of makes me think of The Day Today "no one died" sketch.

[crazy canuck]

This story reminds me of what is happening in the Canada Revenue Agency. A few years back they automated some decision making processes (read some bright bulb decided to jump on the AI bandwagon to gain efficiencies). As a result, they are now in Federal Court trying to get repayment of a tax refund they say was improperly paid out in the amount of just under five million dollars.

Five million is the threshold to get human approval before a refund goes out. It looks like the automated system made a big mistake. And in a related story, an investigative journalist found that CRA only answers about 10% of the calls from people using the CRA information call lines.  The thing that was specifically set up to answer tax payer questions. Callers who can't get through are directed to use the CRA online help (an AI tool that gives incorrect answers).  The other part of the story is that when someone does get through to a human, their answers are also often incorrect.  Why? They are also using the AI tool to answer the questions...

[Sheilbh]

This wasn't AI in the modern sense, but I always think about the Dutch benefits scandal when it comes to algorithmic decision making:
https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-warning-for-europe-over-risks-of-using-algorithms/

Though in the case of the accidental prison releases it appears to be human error. In this case there's a clip of the guy loitering around the front desk asking what to do next because he can't quite believe he's just been let go To Tamas' point about the country being full of dangerous criminals - perhaps not but the government had to release thousands of prisoners early because the prison estate has been operating at 99% capacity for 18 months (that she did this without a massive fuck-up is, I think, the biggest argument in Shabana Mahmood's favour as a competent minister).

Separately I thought this was interesting report from Commons Committee on the asylum hotel situation - thing that strikes me here is the role of rent-seeking outsourcing companies, which I think is really, really key to a lot of our problems. Treasury aversion to having anything on the balance sheet leads to PFI and public-private partnership and outsourced services often for services where there is no actual market to provide that service (so you get none of the benefits of outsourcing). Those companies often bid unrealistically and then fail to deliver, expensively, while state capacity withers on the vine:

Home Office squandered billions on 'failed and chaotic' asylum accommodation
Commons committee describes successive governments' failures to manage hotel use, contracts, spending and safeguarding
Diane Taylor
Mon 27 Oct 2025 00.01 GMT

The Home Office has squandered billions of pounds on asylum accommodation due to long-term mismanagement of a "failed, chaotic and expensive" system, according to a report published by a powerful parliamentary committee.

The Commons cross-party home affairs committee report, published on Monday, highlights the previous and current governments' failures to manage the mix of hotels, large sites such as the Wethersfield former military base in Essex, and shared housing.

It also found the Home Office "incapable of getting a grip on the situation" and identified "failures of leadership at senior level".

The report raises concerns about financial mismanagement of 10-year contracts with the private providers Clearsprings, Mears and Serco, which began in 2019, with the contract value tripling from £4.5bn to £15.3bn.

As the cost soared, failings went unnoticed and unaddressed due to inadequate oversight, the report says. Poor performance was not penalised and excess profits were not reclaimed.

Despite hotels accounting for more than 75% of asylum accommodation spending, no performance penalties were applied to asylum hotels, Napier barracks at Folkestone, or Wethersfield. Meanwhile, under a profit-share agreement, Mears has £13.8m to pay back to the Home Office and Clearsprings £32m, but the Home Office has yet to complete the necessary audit.

The report also says: "We are deeply concerned by the volume of evidence indicating significant safeguarding failings in asylum accommodation."

It particularly raises the alarm about children being wrongly age-assessed as adults by the Home Office and inappropriately placed in adult accommodation.

In its response to the report, a Home Office spokesperson said: "The government is furious about the number of illegal migrants in this country and in hotels. That is why we will close every single asylum hotel – saving the taxpayer billions of pounds ... We have already taken action – closing hotels, slashing asylum costs by nearly £1bn and exploring the use of military bases and disused properties."

The report identifies a number of specific financial failings, including the purchase of the Northeye estate in Bexhill, East Sussex, in September 2023 for £15.4m when it had been sold for only £6.3m a year before. Officials later found the site was contaminated and did not use it. The Home Office spent £48.5m on RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, but cancelled that plan due to soaring costs before any asylum seekers moved in. In one case, a Home Office taskforce found that 244 bed spaces had been charged for that did not exist.

Hundreds of millions were wasted on the Rwanda scheme including £290m paid directly to the Rwandan government, although only four volunteer asylum seekers ever went there. The average cost of shared asylum housing a night is £23.25, while the average costs of a hotel place a night is £144.98.

Steve Lakey, the managing director of Clearsprings, told the committee that hotels were more profitable for them than other forms of accommodation. The report finds "a great disincentive" for accommodation providers to move people out of hotels.

Dame Karen Bradley, the chair of the home affairs committee, urged the Home Office to learn from its previous mistakes to avoid repeating them. She also raised concerns about the department's ability to develop a long-term strategy for asylum accommodation, saying it had focused instead on short-term, reactive responses.

She said: "The Home Office has presided over a failing asylum accommodation system that has cost taxpayers billions of pounds. Its response to increasing demand has been rushed and chaotic, and the department has neglected the day-to-day management of these contracts. The government needs to get a grip on the asylum accommodation system in order to bring costs down and hold providers to account for poor performance.

"Urgent action is needed to lower the cost of asylum accommodation and address the concerns of local communities. While reducing hotel use is rightly a government priority, there will always be a need for flexibility within the system, and the Home Office risks boxing itself in by making undeliverable promises to appeal to popular sentiment. It shouldn't set itself up for more failure."

A British Red Cross spokesperson said: "This report confirms what we've long seen: asylum accommodation often leaves people feeling unsafe and, at times, having their basic needs go unmet.

"Any new government strategy for asylum accommodation should ensure people can live in safety and are treated with compassion and dignity, with proper vulnerability screening and safeguarding on arrival and throughout the process."

Enver Solomon, CEO of the Refugee Council, said: "Hotels should never have become a long-term solution. There is a better way. By speeding up decisions for people from countries where we know most asylum applications succeed, subject to rigorous security checks, the government could end the use of expensive asylum hotels in 2026. The Home Office could then move on to ensuring our asylum system works in a fair and efficient way."

See also Motability - or even the Palestine action attack on RAF Brize Norton. People on an e-scooter breaking into a military base where part of the security is delivered by Serco and the two damaged Voyager aircraft are actually leased to the RAF by a private operator.

All across the board there's just endemic state incompetence - or, often, more accurately quasi-state incompetence. As Aaron Bastani pointed out recently we almost always end up turning to how each side should respond: "it is or isn't racist to think this, it's unacceptable to say that." So we end up debating the boundaries of permissible speech rather than the underlying problem which is that there's no state there, the levers aren't connected to anything. We've got a procurement state - oversight, audit, contract and minimum standards delivering a minimal service and failing even at that. All this in an age of hugely transformative state projects and state capitalism

I think it's also a big part (an aging population is also key here) of why we've got the highest tax levels since the war, highest public spending levels since the war but also such poor services. So many of those poor services are being delivered by private companies with no real incentive to improve. On things we got wrong/changed our mind on - I think possibly the biggest for me is moving from not being dogmatic about ownership or delivery of services to absolutely being dogmatic about it.

[Tamas]

Having the private sector deliver a device but by getting a de facto (regional) monopoly from the state does seem like combining the worst of the two worlds, and all it can be efficient in is corruption.

[Sheilbh]

With outsourcing, I don't think they get monopolies (except for things like public transport - local buses).

[Josquius]

Usually not true monopolies, but very often setups where there's only a small handful of companies with the interest and capacity.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah and very often bidding for work where there literally isn't a market. There's a market for legal services or cleaning - there can be sense in procuring for that. There isn't for, for example, probation services (the example Sam Freedman uses in his book).

But it's very often G4S, Serco, Capita etc. And I'm not often sure they are villains in this either (the Treasury is). When I was a very junior lawyer I worked on the Carillion administration and it was incredible how low the margins were and how much government would put the screws on as a client. In a lot of ways it's amazing more outsourced haven't gone bust. But my sense is it's very, very penny wise. Government will always go for the procurement option with the best "value for taxpayer money" which causes underbidding and if there's a choice between incurring a cost now or a higher cost in the future, they'll always go for the latter.

[Josquius]

Related

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/billions-house-asylum-seekers-animals-rancid-hotels-4004842

We're spending billions to house asylum seekers like animals in rancid hotels
We are not merely spending a fortune on housing asylum seekers. We are spending it on making them live like animals

When people think of hotels, they tend to think of them as a positive thing. Hotels are, after all, something we associate with treats: holidays, Christmas lunches, wedding receptions.

The actual experience of staying in one these days sometimes struggles to live up to this idea, but nonetheless, it might explain some share of the poison currently sloshing around Britain's asylum debate and the housing of asylum seekers in hotels. It is assumed by some that the Government are putting up people, for free, in places which they imagine to be nice.

Alas, we are doing no such thing.

The latest twist in this particular saga arrived on Monday morning, in the form of a damning report from the Home Affairs Committee. A combination of "flawed contracts" and "incompetent delivery", the committee thundered, had led to the "squandering" of literally billions of taxpayer money.

And at the heart of all this is the aforementioned hotels. Such places were only ever intended as a sort of overflow: the vast majority of asylum seekers were expected to be housed in "Dispersal Accommodation". In the event, though, arrival numbers have been higher than expected, and of the 103,000 asylum seekers currently accommodated by the government, 32,000 – nearly a third – are living in 210 hotels.

All this has meant a tripling of costs to the taxpayer, to an eye-watering £15.3bn over 10 years (which is bad), and higher than expected and badly accounted for profits for the contractors providing the homes (which is unlikely to help).

There's another issue, though, which is less likely to be dominating the headlines in quite the same way: much of those billions have been spent on something absolutely horrible.

Investigations by journalists or charities have revealed stories of people housed in windowless rooms smaller than prison cells, or sleeping on dirty mattresses in rooms shared with multiple strangers. Others report inedible food containing no fruit, vegetables or protein and which manage, despite consisting mainly of heavy carbs, to be past their sell-by dates. Some residents claim to have developed diabetes.

Others still report the rationing of sanitary products and toilet paper – a single roll was supposed to last four people a week – or spending entire days in their underwear while they waited for their only outfit to be washed.

"The accommodation asylum seekers are housed in should be adequate," notes the Committee, "and it is unacceptable that significant amounts of taxpayers' money is being used to house often vulnerable people in sub-standard accommodation." We are not merely spending a fortune on housing asylum seekers. We are spending it on making them live like animals.

The defining feature of the modern British state is its unerring ability to do things in a manner that serves almost literally no one. Sure, a few private investors might be happy – such as, to take just one example, Graham King, billionaire founder of accommodation provider Clearsprings Ready Homes, of bad food and limited loo paper fame, who ranked 154th in the latest Sunday Times Rich List. But the asylum system isn't working for the people paying for it, or the communities hosting it, or even the politicians presiding over it.

Worst of all, given that they are vulnerable people in our country as guests, it absolutely does not work for the people who are reliant on it. And yet, they continue to come. Still, they risk life and limb to get here, even though what awaits them is this.

Perhaps that should tell us something about what they're leaving behind.

The thought has often come to me though seems increasingly common, just last night I was wondering about it with asylum hotels. Its weird that the far right often comes vaguely to the right place though they do this through completely broken reasoning.

They hate the asylum hotels.... though they think this way because they hate immigrants and can't stand the thought of them living in luxury and given freebies the fascists themselves are denied.

The asylum hotels are actually terrible.... but this is because we're gifting way over the odds to shifty companies who are providing absolute shit. And the entire reason we got here in the first place was the Tory government dodging doing its job and processing their claims. Penny wise, pound foolish