Britain’s brain drain was hiding in plain sight, now new emigration data proves it. We have engineered an economy where high earners are taxed punitively while low earners are propped up, says Tom Harwood
We saw it all around us. Friends moving abroad. Colleagues relocating. Dubai, Australia, America calling. This modern phenomenon was there for all with eyes to see. And yet only this week has our official statistics body caught up.
Far from the Office for National Statistics’ previous best guess of just 77,000 British Nationals leaving the country last year, an astonishing data revision reveals that the number of Brits estimated to have upped sticks in 2024 was in fact 234 per cent bigger; 257,000 Brits left the country.
More than a quarter of a million British emigrants. That’s the highest number of Brits leaving since comparable ONS records began in 1964. And yet, strangely, no one appears to be sounding the alarm bells.
Why the sudden jump in this week’s revised numbers? The ONS has belatedly treated us to a new methodology. Rather than relying on tiny numbers of dubiously representative passenger surveys, the statistics authority has now decided to use hard data.
Until now, the system relied on hoping long term emigrants would be generous enough to fill out yet another form – namely the the International Passenger Survey – as they move their lives out of this country,.
Thankfully we have now moved beyond this unreliable and self-selecting data source, with the new official measurement being determined by the number of British Nationals who have dropped out of government administration systems like NHS registration or HMRC interaction.
Frustratingly, this belated switch from surveys to real world data means it is difficult to ascertain how much of the increase is down to better data collection, and how much is due to a significant change in behaviour.
Whether this emigration phenomenon saw a significant jump in 2024, or has been rising steadily for some time, it is clear that losing a quarter of a million of your own home-grown citizens every year is not a happy place for an economy to be.
Dubai calling
Especially when, anecdotally, so many of those who are leaving are high productivity individuals.
What is a concrete fact is that our emigration numbers have been far higher than we realised for years – and that’s the scandal.
Britain is increasingly becoming a country hostile to talent, enterprise and wealth. Since 2010, the richest income decile has seen direct taxation soar. Meanwhile every other income bracket has seen their taxes cut, even taking into account the fiscal drag of recent years.
No one wants to admit it, but every income group except the top decile now pays less tax than 15 years ago. Only the top 10 per cent has been made to pay more and more. Those with the broadest shoulders have been made to bear a wildly disproportionate burden.
And next week’s budget will no doubt pile pain on top of pain.
Governments of both red and blue hue have for years now made Britain one of the most generous countries in the world to work on minimum wage, and one of the very worst to work in a definitionally more economically productive job.
We have engineered an economy where high earners are taxed punitively while low earners are propped up by one of the most aggressive minimum wages in the world. The result is a compression of the income distribution that might please Marxist economists, but has consequences in the real world.
We are now suffering a brain drain the likes of which we haven’t seen since the crippling postwar consensus.
Politics too often obsesses over net migration statistics, which are worse than useless if they obscure a phenomenon of high wage high productivity people leaving, while low wage low productivity individuals enter through our horrifically calibrated points based system.
Net migration falling to zero would be a very bad thing if we achieved it by trading asset managers for Deliveroo drivers.
This week’s ONS revisions should be a wake up call to our politicians. And yet somehow the electoral incentives continue to push deeper into the doom loop.
To paraphrase Paul Revere, the British are leaving.
Tom Harwood is deputy political editor of GBNews