what happened to immigration, trade and the economy? – Channel 4 News

It’s been a decade since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union.

After years of arguments and negotiations, the United Kingdom left the EU on January 31, 2020, on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ten years after the vote, FactCheck looks at some of the key promises from both campaigns and where the UK stands today.

Immigration

The promise to control immigration was at the heart of the Brexit campaign.

Writing in The Times two months before the 2016 vote, Michael Gove, a key Brexit campaigner and then justice secretary, said: “Because we cannot control our borders… public services such as the NHS will face unquantifiable pressure as millions more become EU citizens. »

In the year ending March 2016, the number of people entering the UK was 803,000 according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Of these, 294,000 came from the EU, according to The Migration Observatory.

Since 2016, the number of people from the EU has decreased.

However, for those coming from third countries, there has been a sharp increase. This increase began in early 2021, when a new post-Brexit immigration system was introduced.

The peak of non-EU migration occurred in the year ending March 2023, when arrivals reached almost 1.5 million. But since 2023, immigration has been on a downward trajectory according to the ONS.

For the year ending December 2025, according to the latest provisional figures from the ONS, immigration stood at 813,000 people – including those from EU member states and those from countries outside the trading bloc.

So far we have only looked at immigration, that is, people arriving in Britain. But what about net migration – that is, those arriving minus those leaving?

Net migration reached a peak of 944,000 in the year to September 2023. Since then, this figure has been falling. The latest available figure from the ONS shows that net migration for the year to December 2025 stands at 171,000 people. 627,000 came from third countries and 76,000 from the EU. In 2025, 642,000 people left the UK.

And just looking at movements in the EU, the latest ONS data shows that 42,000 more EU citizens left the UK than arrived in the year ending December 2025.

While the Leave vote and our actual exit from the EU appeared to reduce the number of people coming from the EU, this number was offset by the number coming from non-EU countries. Since leaving the EU, the UK has been able to exercise more control over immigration – and different governments have chosen to use this power differently.

So if you had voted to leave to reduce immigration, you might have been disappointed. But if you wanted to give British governments more control over immigration, your wish has been granted.

Trade

The Leave campaign said Brexit would make the UK “free to trade with the whole world“The UK has concluded 40 trade agreements with 74 countries and territories around the world, as well as the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement since Brexit.

According to a London School of Economics (LSE), UK-EU trade fell by 17 to 19 percent in both directions in the post-referendum period and before the UK signed a deal with the EU.

However, Brexit has a potential benefit for UK trade: it means we have avoided the worst tariffs imposed by Donald Trump compared to our continental neighbors.

Professor Thomas Sampson, international trade expert at the LSE said in a blog post: “Being outside the EU means that the UK now faces lower tariffs on its exports to the US and it is not unreasonable to highlight this as a consequence of Brexit. »

Some aspects of the UK’s trading relationship with the EU are not yet fully resolved, such as sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) products. SPS products include everyday products such as fresh sausages and burgers, certain types of shellfish and seed potatoes.

In March 2026, the government announced a new agreement on SPS products. The deal is the latest example of how the Labor government has moved more in line with the EU. In May 2025, at a “reset” summit between the UK and the EU, the two agreed to “deeper cooperation” with each other.

In August 2025, the British Chambers of Commerce reported that “nearly half of companies exporting services cite red tape and market access issues as the main post-Brexit obstacles”. An LSE academic article states that “the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) [which is the deal between the UK and EU agreeing their future trading relationship] reduced the UK’s total exports of goods by around £27 billion (or 6.4 per cent) in 2022 – due to a 13.2 per cent fall in the value of goods exported to the EU.

Logistics UK, which represents the British transport industry, said in 2025: “Between 2017 and 2024, total exports [of physical goods] to the EU fell by 23 percent…. while imports from the EU fell by only 5 percent. This suggests that UK exporters have faced greater friction post-Brexit, while imports have been more resilient.

When it comes to services, for example banking, consultancy, retail and cultural activities, UK exports have performed “strongly” since Brexit in 2020, according to a report. House of Commons Backgrounder. The research paper states that service exports to the EU increased by 28 percent in 2025 compared to 2019 levels. For third countries, service exports increased by 26 percent.

Despite this growth in the service sector, experts in the LSE declared in June 2025: “Overall, UK services exports are estimated to be down 4 to 5 percent, indicating that five years on, Brexit has failed to deliver on its vision of a global Britain.”

So while we may be exporting more services than before Brexit, these researchers conclude that we could have been even better off if we had not left the EU.

Northern Ireland

As this 2017 FactCheck article explains, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has always been a complex issue. Before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, Northern Ireland had experienced periods of intense violence. The Troubles, as they were commonly known, were primarily about Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom, a topic that Brexit has brought into focus.

On February 29, 2016, the former Mayor of London and prominent Brexit campaigner, Boris Johnson told BBC News: “I think the situation will be absolutely unchanged” regarding the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. When Johnson was Prime Minister, he told the Conservative Party conference in 2019 that “we will not carry out checks at or near the border in Northern Ireland under any circumstances. We will respect the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement.”

In 2017, Theresa May, then number 10, said “no one wants to see a return to the boundaries of the past.”

So what really happened?

From late January 2021 until spring 2023, when Rishi Sunak brought in the Windsor settingif a business wanted to send goods between Northern Ireland (in the UK) and the Republic of Ireland (in the EU), they had to have those goods checked manually, which required paperwork.

The Windsor Framework is an agreement between the EU and the UK to facilitate trade relations for goods to and from the UK and EU. The framework removed barriers to the movement of goods between Northern Ireland and the rest of the EU.

Since the Windsor Framework came into force, the majority of goods require no checks or paperwork when transporting goods between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

But it is important to note that there is still a certain level of additional documents related to Brexit and trade in or around Northern Ireland. For example, when a business in England needs to send a parcel to another business in Northern Ireland, they must submit information to the customs declaration service.

In 2026, there will no longer be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Due to Northern Ireland’s unique position within the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland can trade freely with the EU and the United Kingdom. People can cross the border in the same way as before Brexit. However, certain controls remain on certain products, a direct consequence of Brexit.

Economy

On the side of the Rest, the Treasury has published a report on the “immediate economic impact of leaving the EU” before the 2016 referendum.

In the report, then-Chancellor George Osborne said “a Brexit vote would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy”, pushing the UK into recession and causing “around 500,000 people to lose their jobs”.

It is worth noting that the Treasury report was written on the assumption that Article 50, which marks the start of the formal process of leaving the EU, would be triggered as soon as the outcome was known.

But this ultimately did not happen immediately: it was only triggered on March 29, 2017 by Theresa May. It is therefore difficult to know whether the lack of immediate recession after the vote refutes the Treasury’s analysis, or whether the postponement of Article 50 helped to soften the economic shock.

According to an academic article from National Bureau of Economic Research titled “The economic impact of Brexit” The UK economy was around 8% smaller in 2025 than it would have been if the UK had remained in the EU. The same study also indicates that employment and productivity are 3 to 4 percent lower than they would have been, with business investment 12 to 18 percent lower.

A separate Warwick Business School study found that between 2016 and 2019, a period when the UK was technically part of the EU but was looking for the best way out, around £22bn of investment was lost to the EU. The study reveals that this investment would have led to the creation of 100,000 jobs, many of which would have been in “high value” sectors such as banking and professional services.

Although the Remain campaign’s more pessimistic claims of an immediate recession and massive job losses have not materialized, a number of leading business surveys and academic papers have found that Brexit has had a negative impact on the UK economy compared to remaining in the EU.

For more analysis on how Brexit has affected the UK, you can check out our YouTube documentary from the Foursight team here. Kiran Moodley explores the impact of Brexit in more detail and interviews one of the key architects of the Vote Leave campaign, Lord Elliott.