The effects on the NHS and GP surgeries of consistently high immigration since 2001 have been dire. New polling from Merlin Strategy and the Prosperity Institute confirms what most people instinctively know: half of respondents/the public view immigration as more of a burden than a benefit to the NHS, with only 22 percent taking the opposite view. Even among Labour voters, one in three see immigration as a net negative for the health service. The public, it seems, have grasped something that our politicians have been slow to confront: immigration is a negative, not a benefit, for the NHS
The argument that without its foreign-born personnel the NHS would simply collapse is bogus. It is a self-serving narrative used to justify decades of workforce planning failure. According to the General Medical Council, doctors who qualified outside the UK now make up 42 percent of those practising here – more than double the average of 20 percent across comparable Western nations. Britain has not arrived at this position because foreign recruitment is desirable in itself, but because successive governments have chronically underinvested in training our own people. Doubtless, it is also cheaper to recruit overseas-trained medics. The GMC also tells us between 2019 and 2023, the proportion of doctors in England with a non-UK primary qualification grew by 38 percent, while growth among UK-qualified doctors was just 10 percent.
Central to this failure is the government-imposed cap on medical school places. The Department for Health and Social Care currently funds around 7,500 places per year for home students, despite the fact that more than 24,000 people applied to study medicine in 2024. Thousands of highly qualified British young people – many with top-notch A Level results – are being turned away from medical school each year because there are simply not enough funded places. The absurdity of this was laid bare when Brunel University opened a medical school in 2022 without a single British student on its books, because the government had refused to allocate any publicly funded places. The University of Chester faced the same predicament. Even Wes Streeting MP, now Secretary of State for Health, called the situation “ludicrous.”
British students, whose families have contributed to the exchequer for generations, are denied the opportunity to train as doctors and nurses in their own country. Meanwhile, those who do arrive from overseas increasingly struggle to find work: only one in eight international doctors who passed the GMC’s licensing exam last year secured a position within six months, down from one in four just two years earlier. The current set-up is failing everyone.
And let’s not forget the impact on the countries these medical professionals migrate from. The World Health Organisation has urged wealthy nations to avoid depleting the workforces of poorer countries. When our government recruits thousands of doctors from Nigeria, Pakistan and India – countries where doctor-to-patient ratios are much worse than in the UK – we are causing huge problems for those societies, simply to make up for our own failure to train our own young people.
Medical school places must be expanded urgently, at scale, and prioritising British citizens. The cap that prevents British students from studying medicine in their own country must be lifted. And pro-migration ideologues must finally accept that a National Health Service built on endless migration from the developing world is neither sustainable nor ethical.