No, neither does our government
A shocking exclusive, revealing the huge cost of immigration to the UK
This 2-Part ‘Migration Costs Special’ blows the lid off the crisis, adding to security & safety concerns
In this Stand for Our Sovereignty and Facts4EU first, we present a two-part ‘Costs of Immigration Special’. How much are the cumulative effects of the immigration crisis – legal and illegal – now costing us each year?
Stand for Our Sovereignty (SOS), in collaboration with The Facts4EU think-tank and The Campaign for an Independent Britain (CIBUK), has researched extensively through the official files and can now exclusively present the first part of the results, with the ultimate total coming in Part II tomorrow.
The main cost areas
Given that the government tells us the benefits of immigration outweigh the costs, it seemed reasonable to ask what are the gross direct costs. As the government can’t – or won’t – tell us, Stand for Our Sovereignty and colleagues have taken a deep-dive into the official data to bring readers this ground-breaking analysis and summary.
Most reports on immigration have focused on recent trends. Uniquely, this two-parter looks at how the cumulative effect of many years of mass immigration is affecting public expenditures of all kinds. This is being felt across the country and affects many aspects of everyone’s lives.
The costs are spread across government departments, quangos and agencies, with some of the key ones being the Home Office, Dept for Work and Pensions, Dept of Health and Social Care, Dept for Education, and the Ministry of Justice.
Quantified, shocking costs versus theoretical ‘estimated’ benefits
The figures we will reveal are shocking and far exceed any which the government has ever summarised or acknowledged. All are derived from official sources.
Governments have focused on what they claim are the estimated benefits from increased tax revenues and contributions to UK GDP. By contrast, these two reports look purely at the gross costs we face each year as a result of overall immigration. What follows are quantifiable facts drawn from official figures. We leave it to the government to provide factual and quantifiable benefits to offset these costs.
1. The Home Office: ‘Small’ boats and illegal immigration have added to all the costs
Whilst this report analyses the effects of all immigration over the years, there is one government department with some significant expenditures where the costs relate to the continuing crisis in the English Channel.
That department is the one responsible for protecting our borders and then for dealing with the migrants who come as a result of its failures, as well as those of politicians. That department is the Home Office.
Politicians frequently quote a figure of £4 billion if asked for the annual cost attached to illegal migrants. This is only part of the story, however, and in the chart below we show other areas which appear in the 2025/6 Report and Accounts for the Home Office. In one case we had to make a conservative estimate and that is Border Force, where the total for Resource and Capital is £1.5bn. We have conservatively allocated only £0.25bn (<20%) of this for what most readers would consider to be ‘immigration purposes’.”
The £6 billion of annual public money being spent by the Home Office
In short, our figure is 50% higher than that usually quoted.
Even after reading what the various functions at the Home Office do, it is unclear why it has been structured in the way it has been. This is reinforced by the number of major organisational changes that have been made – more of which are planned this year.
Over the years, Facts4EU has published the findings of the government’s ‘Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration’ (ICIBI) in their annual reports, which essentially have accused the Home Office of having systems that are ‘not fit for purpose’. When one Chief Inspector was replaced after his third very negative annual report in a row, his successor simply carried on the criticisms.
SUB-TOTAL FOR ANNUAL HOME OFFICE COSTS: £6.1 BILLION P.A.
Lord (John) Redwood, former Secretary of State
commented exclusively to Stand for Our Sovereignty and Facts4EU
“Facts4EU brilliantly lift the veil on just how much illegal and legal migration costs UK taxpayers.
“We see it most obviously in the Home Office budget tackling illegals, with their new fleet of four rescue boats costing £30m when the Royal Navy was unable to send in good time a single ship to support Cyprus under threat. We see it with the costs of two planes providing regular surveillance of the Channel to find the illegal boats. We see it in the need for centres to handle hundreds of new illegal arrivals a day, and in the £662 m we are giving to France to help them do their job of policing their own beaches for illegal boat crossings.”
“People are most annoyed at the costs of illegal migrants, asking why the French do not stop these dangerous journeys for all the money we give them. They ask why the UK seems to give priority to rescuing them ahead of securing our borders and smashing the gangs that exploit and profit from this trade. Most people’s favourite spending cut and saving for taxpayers is for government to end the arrival of hundreds of mainly young men every day the sea is calm.”
2. The Ministry of Justice (England and Wales only)
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is not one of the high-spending government departments as it has a fairly well-defined brief. Nevertheless in each of the three expenditure areas below we have either been able to identify actual costs attributed to migrants, or to apply the proportions represented by migrants to a cost centre.
[Note: Irish nationals and those whose nationality was not recorded have been excluded.]
The figures for the MoJ show how even a small government department can accumulate significant costs due to years of mass immigration.
SUB-TOTAL FOR ANNUAL MINISTRY OF JUSTICE COSTS: £1.0 BILLION P.A.
BEFORE WE CONTINUE…
Please support our work
If more patriotic members of the public donate, we will keep going.
Please donate today to our research partner, Facts4eu, if you would like to continue reading us tomorrow, next week, and the weeks after.
3. ‘This may be an education…’
We now turn to one of the bigger areas of public expenditure. As with all departments, the Department for Education (DfE) has relatively little to say about the impact that years of mass immigration have had on its provision of services, and the associated costs.
One of the ways of assessing this is by looking at the proportion of schoolchildren who are classified as ‘EAL’. This acronym stands for ‘English as an Additional Language’. Additional provision is made for these children at some cost, hence the reason for DfE’s classification.
To be clear, the cost we have shown below is not the cost of the extra language provisions (which are expensive in any case), it is the cost of the number of pupils for whom English is not their first language multiplied by the DfE’s annual cost per pupil. The pupils will either be migrants themselves or the children of migrants.
The £11.6bn it costs to educate the children of migrants
In addition, readers will be familiar with news reports of classrooms in parts of the UK where it is necessary to have translators in addition to a qualified teacher, and indeed classrooms where English is the minority language.
SUB-TOTAL FOR ANNUAL EDUCATION COSTS: £11.6 BILLION P.A.
Summary of costs – Part I
Coming up in Part II
The overall total for Part I we have identified for these first three government departments is £18.7 billion in one year.
This may sound a lot of money that all has to be paid for – and it is – but it almost pales into insignificance when put alongside what is coming up tomorrow, in Part II. And the overall total from both parts of this report is genuinely enormous. You do NOT want to miss this!
Lord Redwood, former Secretary of State
with his final, exclusive comments to Stand for Our Sovereignty and Facts4EU
“The costs of migration in general come from extra strains on the criminal justice system and the Home Office, long after people have arrived. The government refuses to tell us about the crimes committed by a minority of recently arrived people, though there is evidence from similar countries that crime rates amongst some of the groups coming illegally are particularly high.
“Migrants with little English require translators and free legal support when they do get entangled with the criminal justice system. They may not understand our law and have different views on acceptable behaviour. Defenders of migrants point out that we have our own rapists, murderers and violent people at home, but that is no reason to want to bring more of them here without checks on their past. Deporting foreign criminals currently in our prisons is an important part of managing our prisons more successfully, so reducing the numbers of arrivals who might end up in prison is also an important idea.”
How we calculated the costs
Very broadly, the proportion of non-British people in the population now stands at 19%, according to the Office for National Statistics. Almost one in five people in the UK hail from other countries. They have arrived in the UK via a variety of means, legal and illegal, but whatever their route they consume public services which all have to be paid for.
These two reports look at the spending of some of the main government departments. In some cases these departments have started separating out costs by nationality or immigration status. In other cases there are line items in the reports and accounts showing the cost for a service which is clearly only provided for non-UK-born individuals, as for example in the Home Office costs for Asylum Support, Resettlement, and Accommodation.
Where government departments have done so, Facts4EU has used this information in the charts below. In other cases the departments can’t or won’t separate out costs. Facts4EU has therefore identified the proportion of the costs represented by foreign nationals. For example, we know the number of foreign nationals in our prisons and we know the average annual cost per prisoner. Multiplying these two items gives us the total cost per year for non-British prisoners.
Is our final total for the cost to the public purse represented by the immigrant population 100% accurate? Of course not. Is it a reasonable, indicative estimate based on as much official, detailed information as possible? Yes.
Observations
If our sub-total of nearly £19 BILLION were the full annual cost of immigration, this alone would be considered by most people to be a huge cost. Sadly, this is only a relatively small part of the annual cost.
In Part II tomorrow, we analyse and detail further costs of immigration which make today’s numbers almost pale into insignificance. The combined annual total is so large it made the government departments mentioned in both reports sit up when they were asked to comment. This report has been delayed in order to give them time to come up with their responses.
No doubt some will say we have only stated the gross costs to the country of mass immigration and that this does not take into account all the benefits it brings. To that we would simply ask them to analyse and quantify these benefits. Given the full magnitude of costs we will be concluding in Part II tomorrow, vague statements or ‘estimates’ will not suffice.
If it is indeed true that mass immigration has brought benefits which far outweigh the costs, then it should be possible to quantify these from the official figures, as we have done for the costs.
Please, please help us to carry on our vital work in defence of independence, sovereignty, democracy and freedom by donating today to our research-engine: Facts4EU.Org or becoming a Member of Stand for Our Sovereignty. Thank you.
Please support our work
If more patriotic members of the public donate, we will keep going.
Please donate today to our research partner, Facts4eu, if you would like to continue reading us tomorrow, next week, and the weeks after.