Burnham — Migration “Needs to Fall Further”; Doorstep Concerns
At Friday’s Makerfield campaign launch, Andy Burnham said that UK net migration “needs to fall further”, after Office for National Statistics data on Thursday showed net migration had almost halved to 171,000 in 2025. People on the doorstep, Burnham said, have “raised their concerns about immigration” with him. The Greater Manchester mayor said the latest figures show the “trend is significantly down” but added the government must “get the balance right” on its plans to make it harder for migrants to settle permanently in the UK. The Home Office has forecast around 1.6 million people could settle in the UK between 2026 and 2030 if no further changes are made.
The Burnham migration framing aligns explicitly with Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s skills-based crackdown and consolidates the move begun in Wednesday’s Guardian report that Burnham’s allies confirmed he would not seek to dilute the government’s migration curbs — including the extension of indefinite leave to remain from five to ten years that Angela Rayner had described as “un-British”. Reform UK’s “open-borders Andy” attack line was the prompting variable; the Friday launch positioning consolidates the move. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has framed the by-election as a “David versus Goliath battle”; their candidate Robert Kenyon — a local plumber who came within 5,399 votes of Josh Simons in 2024 — will be the operational test of whether Burnham’s migration positioning works at the constituency level.