The Government didn’t need to wait for the ONS to release the migration figures to begin taking action to reduce the number of people able to come into the UK. Two days prior to those statistics coming out – which showed a record 606,000 people came to the UK on net in 2022 – the Home Secretary Suella Braverman was informing the House of Commons of her 6-point plan to drive the numbers down.

At the top of her list was the intention to remove “the right for international students to bring dependents unless they are on postgraduate courses currently designated as research programmes.” Enforcement will also be beefed up, with “unscrupulous” education agents clamped down on.

The exact impact this will all have is uncertain, but needless to say, the UK will now be viewed less favourably among prospective students looking to study abroad. And while these reforms were all related to foreign students, in the coming weeks and months, be sure to expect further agitation from migration hawks clamouring for measures to reduce the numbers of other types of immigrants as well.

Debates on immigration are all too often typified by feelings rather than facts. And as someone who comes down on the more liberal side of the argument, I think it’s worth pointing out what research we have published in this space, to give a little in the way of concrete evidence.

A statistic of our own which we’re particularly proud of sheds light on the share of fastest-growing companies set up by people who have moved to the UK. In 2019, we found that this stood at 49% – in other words, half of the country’s fastest-growing companies had a foreign-born founder or co-founder, despite immigrants making up only about one seventh of the total population. It’s a figure that’s been used by the Prime Minister no less, and underscores the importance of foreign talent when it comes to the forefront of success in business.

Beyond company founders, immigrants have been indispensable to the growth of many businesses – especially where they can provide scarce skill sets. To best enable this, we need a visa system which is fit for purpose. Some readers might be surprised to hear that there are instances where the UK has moved in a more positive direction on this lately. One example is the creation of the High Potential Individual (HPI) Visa, which allows graduates from leading universities to move to the UK for two years without a job offer. Yet even here, there’s room for improvement – and in True Potential, we explained how to do exactly that. At present, the HPI Visa’s methodology for which universities it covers gives more weight to student-teacher ratios than how students do in the world of work upon graduating, which is surely what we should be interested in. As a case in point, India’s prestigious Institutes of Technology are currently excluded, despite the fact they count the CEOs of IBM and Google among their alumni. Do we really want to be throwing up barriers to these sorts of people?

As well as – and perhaps because of – visa complexity, something else we’ve been highlighting recently is the seeming inability of the Home Office in simply fulfilling its end of the bargain when it comes to approving applications. In Operation Innovation, our handbook for building a more innovative Britain, Coadec’s Bella Rhodes notes: “too often we speak to startups where the decisions have been delayed by three months or more. The problem is not policy intent – it is red tape and delays within the Home Office.”

Having spent a decade as the voice for Britain’s entrepreneur community, we don’t need to be persuaded of the value of immigrants to individual companies, and the economy at large. Perhaps the fact that so many politicians have comprehensively failed to get numbers down suggests, in a weird way, that they don’t either. And thank goodness for that.

Investors Calling
For a while now, we’ve been researching university spinouts, and how best to support them. The Government have started looking at this too, and we’ll be inputting our findings to them. With so much of the focus on founders and technology transfer offices, we’d like to find out more from investors. If you’ve invested in spinouts and would like to share – in confidence – your experience of dealing with them and TTOs, you can get in touch with us here.

Also, in case you missed it, we’ve recently joined forces with FieldHouse Associates to provide a free forum for investors who want to make a positive impact on UK policy. Learn more here.