Burnham (BBC): Net Migration “Needs to Fall Further”; Trend “Significantly Down”
Andy Burnham said today that UK net migration “needs to fall further”, after Home Office figures showed it had almost halved since 2024. The Greater Manchester mayor said the latest figures — net migration of 171,000 in 2025 — show the “trend is significantly down”. The intervention firmly aligns Burnham with Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s skills-based crackdown ahead of his 18 June Makerfield by-election, where Reform UK’s “Brexit betrayal” attack line will test his migration positioning directly. The Home Office has forecast that around 1.6 million people could settle in the UK between 2026 and 2030 if no further changes are made.
Burnham also said in an interview the government must “get the balance right” on its plans to make it harder for migrants to settle permanently in the UK — an implicit boundary marker between his position and the Reform UK Makerfield campaign. The 75,000 Britons aged 16-34 leaving in the same period is the empirical counter-argument: net migration is falling not only because fewer people are arriving, but because more young Britons are leaving. The Burnham migration framing is consistent with his Tuesday Leeds-speech move toward the right of his economic-pitch positioning and tracks the Tuesday Times/YouGov poll showing Burnham 59-37 against Sir Keir Starmer in a head-to-head members’ ballot.