Fewer immigrants could cost Treasury billions

You have seen the falling arrivals figure, held aloft by ministers as a promise kept. You have not yet looked for the person who will pay for it without ever being told that this is what they are paying for. Let us follow the money a little further, and introduce the one who has been left out of the account.

In 2024 the Office for Budget Responsibility did something unusual for an official body: it drew up the second column. Fewer people coming to the UK, it warned, means fewer wages taxed, and a Treasury short by billions of pounds. The minister at the border takes the applause; the bill is delivered to a different building.

Here is what the reporting misses. The cost does not arrive labelled “immigration policy.” It arrives later, as a frozen tax threshold, a delayed hospital wing, a little more borrowing. An innkeeper who turns away half his guests to save on linen will certainly have a quieter house. He will also have a thinner till, and when he raises the price of supper, no diner will blame the empty rooms upstairs.

Follow it one step more. The care home in Hull that cannot fill its night shift does not simply close a bed. A daughter in her fifties cuts her own hours to sit with her mother, and her wages leave the Treasury’s ledger too. No forecast catches her. She is the unseen of the unseen, and she is filling in a form at a kitchen table while the policy is being praised on the radio.

Now, the strongest objection, which deserves respect. The newcomer is not pure revenue. They need a house, a school place, a doctor, and they will grow old and draw a pension. Some, on low wages, may cost more over a lifetime than they contribute. All true, and I will not pretend otherwise, for that would be to make the very error I complain of, merely in the opposite direction.

But notice what the objection concedes. It concedes that this is a purchase. A nation may quite reasonably decide to buy fewer arrivals, as a man may decide to buy a smaller house. What it may not do is pretend the thing is free, and then send the invoice under another name to someone who never saw the receipt.

So I ask only what the OBR’s arithmetic invites and no minister has answered. When the next Budget raises a tax to close the gap, will anyone print, beside the new rate, the name of the policy that made it necessary? Or will the daughter in Hull simply be told that times are hard?