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The United Kingdom witnessed a significant decline in the issuance of work visas in 2025, highlighting the effects of stricter immigration policies. According to data released by the Home Office on Thursday, there was little change in the number of asylum seekers during this period.

The total number of work-related visas issued dropped to 168,000 by December, marking a 20% decrease from the previous year. This figure is also half of what it was in 2023, a year marked by heightened immigration following Brexit.

These statistics are likely to intensify concerns within the Treasury, which worries that the political push to reduce net immigration could negatively impact tax revenue, without adequately addressing public unease over irregular crossings by small boats in the English Channel.

Net migration to the UK has already decreased more than anticipated by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) during the November Budget. It is expected that the OBR will highlight this potential impact when Chancellor Rachel Reeves presents new public finance forecasts next week.

The drop in work visas largely reflected the tougher scrutiny and then closure of a visa route for care staff, but grants to skilled workers, who must now meet higher salary requirements, also fell by a third from 2024. 

The Home Office said the drop in applications for skilled work visas was concentrated in the food and hospitality sector — where many roles would no longer meet new rules restricting visas to graduate occupations — but also reflected “market saturation” in the technology sector.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said Thursday’s data pointed to “a general challenge the government faces, which is that the types of migration that are easiest for the government to control and reduce are the ones that are most economically beneficial — most obviously higher-paid skilled workers in the private sector.”

The number of visas granted for study at UK universities was little changed from 2024, at 407,000. However, including both students and their dependants, there was a drop of more than a third from the peak in the year to June 2023.

Claims for asylum fell by 4 per cent from the year to December 2024 to 101,000, with half of claimants arriving via irregular routes such as small boats. Most of the remainder were already in the UK on other types of visa.

But the government has made some progress in reducing the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels, an issue that sparked protests across the country last summer, as well as reducing the backlog of people waiting for an initial decision on their claims.

More than 30,000 asylum seekers were housed in hotels at the end of 2025, a 20 per cent drop compared with the same period the year before and 45 per cent lower than the peak in September 2023, when 56,108 people were in hotels.

At the end of 2025, there were about 65,000 people awaiting an initial decision on their asylum claim, almost half the total from a year earlier. An increase in decisions helped drive the number of asylum-related returns to almost 12,000 in 2025, roughly a quarter more than the previous year.

The Home Office said the figures show “real progress as we restore order and control to our borders”.

“We have removed nearly 60,000 illegal migrants, numbers in asylum hotels are down, law enforcement action against people smugglers is at record levels and we are bearing down on the asylum backlog,” it said. “But we must go further. The number of people crossing the Channel is too high and too many hotels remain in use.”