A Guardian investigation has revealed that areas that voted Leave in the 2016 EU referendum have experienced faster relative growth in foreign workers since the vote, yet have also become relatively more deprived over the same period.
Data analysis of government Pay As You Earn records shows that between 2016 and the end of 2024, non-UK workers grew fastest in percentage terms in stronger Leave-voting areas. This is largely because these areas had a smaller share of foreign workers before the referendum. For example, in Wigan, where the Makerfield by-election took place, less than 5% of payrolled employees were from outside the UK in June 2016. By December 2024, that figure had risen to just under 10%, more than doubling in relative terms. Nationally, the proportion of foreign workers increased by only 40% over the same period.
Migration Trends After Brexit
Migration across the UK increased after Brexit, particularly for those arriving on health and care visas, peaking at 944,000 in the year ending March 2023. Net migration has since fallen sharply as visas expire. Remain-voting areas, often larger cities, still have the largest absolute numbers of non-UK workers, but the relative growth in Leave areas is more pronounced.
Anand Menon, director of The UK in a Changing Europe and professor of west European politics at King's College London, commented on the political significance of these changes. "People react to change," he said. "We saw this in the lead up to the referendum itself. An extra 10,000 immigrants in central London might barely register, but 200 new arrivals in Boston might be noticed."
Deprivation Trends
Separate Guardian analysis of deprivation data shows that strongest Remain-voting seats in England, such as Bristol Central, Clapham and Brixton Hill, and Cambridge, experienced the largest improvements between 2015 and 2025. In contrast, Brexit-voting areas like Boston and Skegness, Hartlepool, and North Warwickshire and Bedworth became relatively more deprived over the same period.
The analysis combined government deprivation data with constituency-level estimates of the 2016 referendum vote. It suggests that areas with higher Leave votes have tended to fall further behind on health measures, including risk of early death, more people on health-related benefits, and greater hospital admissions for severe illness. A similar pattern appears in housing and services deprivation rankings, where Leave-voting areas have improved more slowly or worsened compared with the rest of the country. Changes in crime deprivation rankings also show a large split by referendum vote.
Makerfield was again fairly representative. Its overall deprivation ranking slipped just seven places relative to other constituencies between 2015 and 2025. However, it fell 52 places down the housing deprivation rankings and 127 places down the crime leaderboards.
Causation and Context
The Guardian warns that the two trends should not be mistaken for cause and effect. Many Leave-voting areas were already marked by long-running economic weakness, and wider research suggests immigration has had only very limited effects on the wages and employment prospects of UK-born workers.
Menon cautioned against ascribing everything to Brexit. "It's all too easy to blame Brexit for everything that's gone wrong in the last few years but it's not the whole story," he said. "It was always the case that more affluent places, that have a higher skilled workforce, were more resilient. Given what's happened with Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, and what's happened to manufacturing it's not surprising that less prosperous places, many of which voted to leave, have become relatively more deprived. Remainers in particular seem to have fallen into the habit of dating our economic travails to 2016. But if our economy had been functioning well then, why would a majority have backed Leave?"
