“800,000 people are due to qualify for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) over the course of the next few years. This press conference is to say, none of them will get it,” Nigel Farage claimed when questioned by Guardian reporter, Eleni Courea, on plans to revoke ILR.
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The Reform UK leader threatened hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants with deportation by pledging to abolish indefinite leave to remain during a press conference.
Farage said this group – which he called the “Boriswave” because they arrived under post-Brexit changes made by Boris Johnson – tended to be young and low-skilled and were “going to be a huge burden on the state” by claiming benefits.
Reform’s central claim that the move would save £230bn was called into question when it emerged that it had been sourced from a Centre for Policy Studies report whose authors said the figure “should not be used” because it was based on erroneous data.
Asked by journalists – including @elenicourea – whether he would withdraw the £230bn figure in light of this, Farage said it was “without a doubt too low” and “underestimates things”.
He did not provide a source for his claim that most migrants relied on benefits, saying he was “firmly of the belief with research backing it up” that more than 50% of the people due to become eligible for ILR in the next few years “are not working, have not worked and in all probability will never, ever work”.
He left open the possibility that families in the UK could be broken up and that Ukrainians and Hongkongers who moved here using special resettlement routes could have their rights to remain revoked.
Reform clarified that its policy of abolishing ILR would not apply to EU immigrants with settled status, raising further questions about the policy’s promised savings. Government sources said 770,000 universal credit claimants who are EU citizens would be exempt from the change. Estimates from the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford put the total population of non-EU citizens with ILR at 430,000 at the end of 2024.
What does “Boriswave” mean? ► https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/23/what-does-boriswave-mean-nigel-farage-reform-uk-immigration
