Pressure on Healthcare, Schools, Roads and Trains - Main Points

The below summary was last updated July 2019

The NHS

There was an average of 2,000 GP registrations per day by those from overseas in 2016/17 (NHS statistics for England, Wales & Northern Ireland).
The UK recently saw the first sustained drop in the number of GPs per head of population since the 1960s. Rapid, immigration-driven population growth is a key (yet often ignored) factor in this trend.
Despite health tourism costing taxpayers hundreds of millions (if not billions) of pounds per year, the British Medical Association has voted to abandon charging overseas patients for treatment.

Immigration-driven population growth adds to pressure on school places and on funding.
Thousands of schools England are already full or over-capacity.
The Department for Education has forecast a further bulge in pupil numbers. An additional 370,000 school places will needed by 2024.
Immigration creates additional pressures connected with pupils whose first language is not English.
One expert warned of increasing cultural segregation in schools, ‘increasing the likelihood of children growing up without meeting or better understanding people from different backgrounds’.

Claims that migrants are less likely to occupy social housing than the UK-born population are highly misleading. ‘Immigration may reduce access to social housing for the UK-born’ (MAC, Sept. 2018).
Pressure on social housing is further increased by the selling-off of housing stock by local authorities.

We are losing more and more of our countryside due to the construction of roads, housing and other facilities needed to accommodate rapid population growth, 80% of which is being driven by immigration.
The UK is one of the world’s 10 most gridlocked countries (Inrix)
Road congestion in London is worse than in Paris, Rome, Berlin and Madrid, with traffic moving at 3.7mph during evening rush hour.

60% of voters believe the high level of immigration is piling too much pressure on public services – Ipsos MORI, 2016.
They are right. Immigration to the UK has resulted in a considerable cost to the taxpayer of about £18m a day in 1995-2011. Research by Migration Watch UK found that immigration represented a net fiscal cost of £13 billion in 2014/15.