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The Week 16 May 2025

I hope you’re all enjoying the sun! Two weeks on from the local election results, it feels like the Government has spent this week briefing about two different ‘resets’ – resets which seem to be pulling in opposite directions on the topic of immigration.

The Prime Minister is using his trip to Albania to try and make progress on migration. Following his speech on Tuesday and the publication of the Immigration White Paper, the PM is majoring on the end of a “failed experiment in open borders”. Measures to reduce the number of work, study and dependent visas granted are key. But it remains to be seen what kind of carve outs will be made for sectors which have historically enjoyed significant exemptions, like construction and care workers, with sector leaders already challenging the Government’s plans. And on failed asylum seekers, the Government plan to tighten up the rules around family and private life appeals can frustrate the process.

But the big news from the PM’s trip is new overseas “return hubs”. Many people will be getting Rwanda deja-vu, but the Government’s plan is focused only on removing failed asylum seekers to these hubs, and says it’s in talks with a number of countries for deals (despite the Albanian PM immediately making clear that Albania is not, in fact, one of those).

In parallel, the Government are trying to land the long-awaited EU ‘reset’, where the Commission are pressing for a better deal for EU students in the UK, and a youth mobility scheme for young people to work here. Closer cooperation with the EU is seen as an important path to growth, and one the Government would like to land following the India and US trade agreements.

The tension between these two parallel tracks highlights some fundamental trade-offs between Government policies. Growth, and controlling the costs of the health & care system, has been a core part of previous Government’s narratives on the need for higher levels of immigration. Can Labour pull off a different kind of compromise between these two goals? We will have to see.

On a separate note, you are reading the last ever edition of The Week. Thank you so much for subscribing and reading. Something new and very exciting will be landing in your inbox next Friday instead. As our Director Charlotte Pickles said on Newsnight last night, we have a big announcement coming, so watch this space!

Read of the week...

Researchers at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies have written an excellent case study on “How bureaucratic shuffling in JAIC and CDAO obscured the real challenges of government AI adoption”. It explores the challenges of the US Department of Defence’s different efforts to drive AI adoption through their armed forces, with plenty of relevant lessons for UK planners. Many of the themes, like aligning funding control with decision-making about technology, and defining acceptable levels of risk from AI products, echo our own report on UK government AI adoption, Getting the machine learning. With the Strategic Defence and Security Review on the horizon, and a new defence innovation unit already launched (alongside existing units like DASA, Dstl, and force-specific innovation programmes), the lessons around bureaucratic failure are well worth a reminder.