New official UK migration figures to be published on Thursday are expected to show that a record number of European migrants have come to work in Britain since the Brexit vote last June.
Separate official figures are expected to show that the post-Brexit rush by European Union nationals in Britain to secure their right to remain by applying for residency certificates has left the Home Office with a mountain of nearly 100,000 “work in progress” applications.
The quarterly Office for National Statistics data covers the period from July to September – the first full quarter since Britain voted for Brexit in the summer referendum.
They are expected to show that annual net immigration remains above the 300,000 mark – three times the level of Theresa May’s target to reduce it below 100,000 for the 12 months to the end of September 2016.
The immigration figures are also likely to underline that although a major theme in the referendum campaign was the pledge to take back control of Britain’s borders there are unlikely to be any deep cuts in immigration before Britain actually leaves the EU in two years’ time.
Indeed, the last set of figures published in December showed that immigration to Britain had reached 650,000 – its highest ever annual level – in the run-up to the June referendum, fuelled by record numbers of European migrants coming to work in Britain.
Home Office “transparency data” also published in December revealed that the number of citizens of other EU states living in Britain who had applied for permanent residence cards and documents for non-EU family members showing their right to remain in the UK had risen to more than 90,000 by the end of last September.
This was an increase from just 37,618 “work in progress” cases in June 2015. Senior Home Office officials have acknowledged the problems they face in dealing with the surge of applications and are making strenuous efforts to design new online systems to cope with the change from “a niche to a mainstream” activity.
Figures for the fresh EU nationals’ residence applications, to be published on Thursday, are expected to show that at the end of December the backlog remained at a similar level.
