Travel News

BY  Charles Hymas

A record number of Britons left the country in the year Labour was elected amid growing fears over Rachel Reeves’s tax plans, official figures have revealed.

The departure of 257,000 British nationals in the year ending December 2024 – more than three times the previous estimate of 77,000 – fuelled a drop in net migration.

Over the four years from 2021 to last year, some 992,000 Britons left the UK – up from the previous estimate of 343,000, according to new data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The surge in British nationals leaving the UK comes amid rising taxes and a crackdown on non-dom residents that came into force as part of a Labour drive to raise almost £4bn.

Next week, Ms Reeves, the Chancellor, is expected to announce major tax rises in a make-or-break Budget after increases of £40bn, including a National Insurance raid, last year.

Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary, said: “Labour’s economic exodus is in full flight as people flee Rachel Reeves’s tax hikes and mismanagement. It’s potentially the biggest reverse migration in British history.

“This was entirely predictable – when you tax something, you get less of it, and now people are voting with their feet.”

According to the new calculations, net migration peaked at 944,000 in the year ending March 2023, higher than the previous estimate of 906,000. However, it then fell to a low of 345,000 in the year ending last December – lower than the previous estimate of 431,000.

It is difficult to make comparisons with figures from previous years because of the different methods used in the calculations, but the data suggest that 2024 was a record.

The slump coincided with a Tory immigration crackdown in January that year, which included barring foreign workers and students from bringing in their dependants and the introduction of higher salary thresholds for migrants seeking skilled jobs in the UK.

But the exodus of British nationals was the main driver of the dramatic fall in the ONS’s net migration estimates.

In the March 2024 Budget, the previous Conservative government announced plans to water down generous tax breaks for non-doms – citizens who live in the UK, but whose permanent home for tax purposes is registered abroad.Ad

The Tories have since admitted that they were wrong to target wealthy individuals, with Mr Griffith telling The Telegraph earlier this year that the decision to tighten the rules was “regrettable”.

Labour went further, with Ms Reeves replacing non-dom status with a residence-based regime that brought foreign earnings into UK inheritance tax. The change, which came into force in April, left many wealthy individuals subject to HMRC taxes on their overseas earnings.

Analysis earlier this year suggested that an exodus of wealthy people seeking to avoid tax rises could lose the exchequer £12.2bn over this Parliament if half of non-doms decided to leave Britain.

Others are also leaving and blaming the UK’s high-tax regime. Former England footballer Rio Ferdinand quit the UK for Dubai, suggesting the move was because of rising taxes and failing public services.

Herman Narula, the boss of Improbable, a £2.5bn tech firm, told The Telegraph he was preparing to emigrate from the UK to the UAE amid a planned levy intended to stop the wealthy from avoiding paying taxes by shifting their wealth to a low-tax jurisdiction.

Others who have left reportedly include Richard Gnodde, the Goldman Sachs supremo, and Nik Storonsky, the co-founder of Revolut.

However, it was claimed in August that the scale of the non-doms leaving matched official forecasts, or even fell below predictions that as many as 25 per cent of those with trusts would leave the country.

Ms Reeves has since appeared to try to assuage the fears of the well-off, with the Treasury scrapping plans for an “exit tax” targeting wealthy individuals who choose to leave the country.

The net migration numbers were revised on Tuesday after the ONS updated its methodology to replace less accurate ways of calculating the number of people entering the country minus those leaving.

Net migration was previously based on the International Passenger Survey, but the ONS now uses data from the Department for Work and Pensions, which incorporates everyone with a National Insurance number and which can be used to determine people’s likely immigration status.

It means that the UK is on course to return to pre-Brexit levels of net migration of between 200,000 and 250,000, if not lower, as a result of both the Tories’ measures and plans by Sir Keir Starmer to continue driving down immigration.

Labour has proposed that some 180 occupations will no longer be eligible to recruit overseas. Migrants will only be able to obtain a job if the position is graduate-level or above in an attempt to end low-paid migration.

On Monday, Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, unveiled further reforms to asylum, which aim to ramp up deportations and reduce the “pull factors” that have made the UK Europe’s top destination for “asylum shoppers”.

They include plans to forcibly deport migrant families whose asylum claims have been rejected if they refuse cash incentives to leave the UK, ending refugees’ automatic right to stay in the UK, and forcing those who remain to wait for permanent settlement for 20 years.