A new policy paper published today by Prosper UK, the centre-right movement co-chaired by Andy Street and Ruth Davidson, argues that Britain’s immigration debate has lost sight of the growth question. An Immigration Plan for Growth, headed by former Justice Secretary Sir David Gauke, calls on the Government to attract high-skilled immigration and invest what employers pay in immigration charges directly into training British workers.

Public trust depends on secure borders and control over who enters. A separate Prosper UK paper will set out how to stop irregular migration and small boat crossings. On work migration and growth, the paper calls on the Government to:

• Compete harder for high-skilled migrants
• Publish an Annual Migration Plan built around growth and find out why more Britons are leaving than arriving
• Introduce a targeted investor visa for AI, life sciences and other growth sectors
• Agree a capped, time-limited UK-EU youth mobility deal with no return to free movement

Net migration has already halved, dropping to 171,000 in the year to December 2025, and Skilled Worker main applicant applications fell 40 per cent in the year to April 2026. The harder question is whether the reforms delivering that fall are also driving away the specialists, senior executives and entrepreneurs the economy depends on. Around 136,000 more British nationals left the UK than arrived in 2025 and the gap has widened every year since 2022, while more than a million young people aged 16 to 24 are not in employment, education or training.

Sir David Gauke said:

A strong economy should be the nation’s priority. It is only through a strong economy that we can improve living standards, fund our public services and give the next generation the opportunities the last one had. A serious, selective immigration policy is one of the levers that helps deliver it.

Immigration has to be controlled, and public trust in the whole system depends on secure and well-managed borders. But if the debate stops there, we miss the point. The question that matters for growth is whether Britain is competing hard enough for the migrants who create wealth. On the current evidence, the answer is no.

There is much that could be said about the reforms of recent years. Some were necessary because there were too many coming here who were not net contributors. But numbers alone are not a strategy, and it is possible to bring net migration down while at the same time deterring the entrepreneurs and specialists the economy needs and doing nothing to rebuild the domestic pipeline. There is a serious argument to be had about how immigration policy can serve growth. This paper sets it out.

Notes to editors

The paper notes that 779,000 visas were issued in the year to March 2026, most for study (413,000) and work (253,000), with 39,000 people detected arriving via illegal routes. It also highlights that the UK now has more than 1 million 16–24-year-olds not in education, employment or training, underscoring the urgency of rebuilding the domestic talent pipeline over the next five years.

Prosper UK will continue to evaluate the Government’s Indefinite Leave to Remain reforms as they develop, including their impact on the UK’s ability to attract the most economically beneficial migrants and their integration outcomes.