The Telegraph, 28th September 2025
Britain cannot afford a youth mobility scheme
As the Government lurches from one crisis to the next, the Chancellor decides now is the moment to push another hare-brained scheme. Not to help her party. Not to help the country. But to indulge a fantasy that has been doing the rounds in Treasury orthodoxy for far too long: the idea that virtually every problem in Britain can be solved with more immigration.
Rachel Reeves is apparently calling for an ambitious EU youth migration scheme in advance of the Budget. The justification, we are told, is that this will “improve the public finances”. Forgive the laughter. Reeves presides over spiralling debt, rising unemployment, anaemic GDP growth. Taxes have hit eye-watering levels. Improving the public finances? In Reeves’s hands, the phrase has all the credibility of a burglar offering tips on home security.
She repeats the same mistake that too many of my colleagues in the Conservative party made before her: assuming that more migration – any migration, of any kind – is, by default, good for the economy. It isn’t.
The Chancellor’s proposal is for a “youth experience visa” capped, she insists, allowing Europeans aged 18 to 30 to live and work in Britain for two or three years. The superficial attractions are obvious. More foreign students paying inflated fees to sustain our beleaguered higher education sector. More young workers staffing our restaurants, our cafés, more au pairs. “A win-win,” Reeves will say. Except it isn’t.
The economic benefits are negligible. The costs – social and financial – are real. One estimate suggests such a scheme might add £5bn to the economy. I have my doubts. For that fantasy number to materialise, Britain would need either hundreds of thousands of extra migrants spending tens of thousands each, or smaller numbers spending hundreds of thousands. Neither outcome is remotely plausible. The likely reality? Tens of thousands of lower-paid workers squeezed into hospitality or childcare, while ministers congratulate themselves on “growth”, even though, per capita, GDP is shrinking. All while hundreds of thousands of Brits aged from 18 to 30 continue to claim out-of-work benefits, at vast expense
to the taxpayer.
Then there is the housing crisis. The mandarins at the Office for Budget Responsibility may have toned down their cheerleading for mass migration, but the orthodoxy remains intact: more people equals more GDP. What they refuse to countenance are the hidden costs – pressure on services and above all housing. Just 48 per cent of demand for purpose-built student accommodation is currently met. That means hundreds of thousands of students spilling into the private rental market, inflating rents and straining local communities. None of this, of course, seems to trouble the spreadsheets at the Treasury.
It is also wholly unnecessary. British students already have ample opportunities to study or work in EU countries through the post-Brexit Turing Scheme or via student visas.
As for EU students coming here, the apocalypse so confidently predicted after Brexit never materialised. Their numbers fell, yes – but they were swiftly replaced (and indeed outstripped) by students from China, India and Nigeria.
Last year alone, 75,000 EU students were still enrolled in our universities. In total, the number of foreign students in Britain has reached an eye-watering 732,000 – nearly double the figure a decade ago. Far from being deprived, our higher education sector is positively raking it in, laughing all the way to the bursar’s office. No wonder we have so many mediocre universities that offer substandard courses – the sector is fat on foreign cash. What the UK economy needs is more young people going into the trades and vocational training, not more Business Management or Gender Studies graduates.
Most galling of all is the context. Britain is in the midst of a migration crisis. Forget the Channel boats for a moment: legal migration has spun utterly out of control. By June 2022, this country issued a record 1.1 million work and study visas. Net migration was running at close to a million a year. Yes, this happened on the Conservatives’ watch. I fought to turn the tide, pushed reforms through and was largely blocked by my own Cabinet colleagues. The point remains: we should be reducing numbers with urgency, not doubling down on failed dogma.
If what is proposed is a very small-scale youth exchange scheme capped at say 5,000, as a token gesture of goodwill between the UK and EU, then I would not object. There will be zero benefit to the economy and the costs will be negligible. But a visa programme extending beyond that starts to re-open the free movement floodgates.
For a decade we have imported more people than at any time in our history. Has growth boomed? Has GDP per capita surged? Quite the opposite. The numbers are stark. Migration has not caused economic growth. It has not even correlated with it. Yet the Treasury and the OBR continue to chant their mantra that “more migrants are good for the economy”.
When, one wonders, will they finally wake up? When will they realise that endlessly importing people to prop up a failing model is not just economically illiterate – it is socially destructive, politically unsustainable, and morally indefensible?
Suella
