Economists Slam Reform UK’s ‘Fantasy’ Claims That ‘Boriswave’ Migrants Will Cost Households £20,000

Ahead of local elections in May, Reform UK has launched a fresh anti-migrant campaign claiming that the so-called ‘Boriswave’ of post-Brexit migrants will cost the UK £622 billion – or around £20,000 per household.

“We are standing on the edge of fiscal disaster,” said Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson. “The Boriswave is the legacy of Tory incompetence and Labour’s open border ideology.”

Nigel Farage echoed the claim in The Telegraph, describing migration as a “ticking economic timebomb” that would impose a “national bill” of £20,000 per household that “could bankrupt the country.”

However, economists and migration experts say that Reform UK’s widely-reported claims are based on dodgy figures and inflated assumptions. They warn it risks heavily overstating the true fiscal impact and ignores the broader postive contributions that migrants make to deprived sectors like social care. 

While Reform and a host of right-wing news organisations – including GB News, The Daily Express, The Spectator, and others – were quick to present the £622 billion figure as an objective fact this week, economists warn that it’s extremely misleading.

‘The Analysis Seems Wildly Off’

Dr. Madeleine Sumption, director of Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, told Byline Times that all of the key data is not yet available for a full fiscal impact assessment, and that Reform UK’s analysis does not even adhere to standard financial forecasting procedure.

“There is not yet a high-quality estimate for the total fiscal impact of migration under the post-Brexit immigration system,” Sumption said. “Detailed data on earnings and benefits use are not yet available for all groups, including important groups like refugees that are likely to have a significant impact on the overall calculation.”

“The main reason the headline figures are so high in the Reform estimate is that it does not adopt the standard practice of discounting, i.e. valuing costs and benefits now as more important than costs and benefits in the future,” she said. “This has a big impact on the numbers because many of the costs of migration come decades down the line, while benefits come sooner.”

As opposed to the shocking £622 billion figure presented widely at events and in reporting, Reform UK admits in their report that the properly discounted figure – per the Treasury green book discount rate of 3.5% – is instead £154 billion. But even that discounted figure, experts say, is still founded on shaky assumptions.

“Why would anyone take these fantasy calculations seriously?” asked Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Policy at Kings College London.

“Reform have simply invented their own numbers for migrant earnings, ignoring the analysis of the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) which used actual data from HMRC,” he said.

Marley Morris, Associate Director for Migration, Trade and Communities at the Institute for Public Policy Research, also highlighted the discrepancies between Reform’s analysis and the “far more detailed” December 2025 study published by MAC.

“The basic approach Reform have taken,” Morris said, “is to try to map different cohorts of migrants onto very rough proxies of household benefits and taxes. That in itself loses a huge amount of nuance in terms of understanding the precise lifetime fiscal net impacts of these migrant groups.”

The MAC report, he claims, properly factors in the income distribution of migrants – and the outsized positive fiscal impact of top earners – whereas that nuance is lost in Reform’s “crude” matching based on ONS income quintiles. “It won’t necessarily capture migrants who are earning loads and loads, and are therefore contributing very large amounts in taxes.”

There are similar concerns about the way they deal with education costs. “Reform has factored in education costs at the household level, including the cost of migrant children,” he said, “but they’re not really accounting for the contributions those children will make later on when they become adults, start working, and form their own households.”

“The Reform analysis seems wildly off,” he concluded. “If you’re looking for this kind of research, the MAC has done a clear and detailed job. It’s a much more credible piece of analysis.”

More broadly, Morris told Byline Times that there may be limitations to looking at migration through a purely fiscal lens. He highlighted that past Governments have created new routes for migrants to fill critical gaps in sectors like social care.

“There has been a shift from the Government towards a real focus on the purely fiscal impacts of migration in the last few years,” he said.

“But it is worth stepping back. Why did the Government introduce the social care route for migrants? It wasn’t actually because they thought there was going to be a net positive fiscal contribution. They didn’t. Their rationale at the time was that there was a significant shortage of care workers, and a real demand from the care sector to make those changes. That’s why they did it. Our personal view is that the policy commitment should be respected.”

Morris also noted that the fiscal trends for migrants are quite hard to separate from those of the general population of Britain and the broader state of our taxation and welfare state. 

“If you look at the overall fiscal profile of care workers, per the MAC analysis, it’s quite similar to that of the median person in the UK. The reason the figures point to this negative net fiscal contribution is to some extent reflective of, yes, low incomes, but also, to some extent, the fact that the current system of tax and spending is broadly not sustainable.”

A Reform UK spokesperson denied the criticisms and said their assumptions and methodology are “entirely defensible”.

They added that the model accounts for higher earners where data is available and includes the future contributions of migrant children, but did not respond in detail to questions about how these are incorporated into the overall estimates.

On the use of undiscounted figures, the party referred Byline Times to its report, where it argues that presenting long-term costs in this way is justified due to inflation.