UK Politics

Last week, Reform UK’s newest MP, Suella Braverman, and the party’s chairman, Zia Yusuf, argued that high levels of migration are placing unsustainable pressure on GP services, leaving British patients struggling to get appointments. This follows new data released by the Centre for Migration Control, suggesting that 752,000 migrants joined the GP register last year.

The Centre for Migration Control, a think tank focused on reducing immigration in the United Kingdom, based its claim on Flag-4 GP registrations, a category that counts anyone whose previous address was outside the UK for three months or more – a group that can include returning British residents as well as new arrivals. The figure of 752,000 Flag-4 registrations may seem large, but it accounted for just more than one in 10 of the roughly 6.5 million new GP registrations last year, a share that falls well short of the “unquenchable demand” Reform portrays.

While the party continues to blame immigration for GP access pressures, it overlooks a central fact about the NHS workforce: More than 40 percent of doctors currently licensed to practise in the UK qualified overseas, and international graduates now make up the majority of new entrants to the medical register. The system Reform claims is being overwhelmed by migrants is, in reality, heavily sustained by them. Yet rhetoric tying GP shortages solely to migrant patients is becoming more frequent.