The £59.2bn tax gap dwarfs the figures politicians and media fixate on
Public debate moves between very large numbers that measure very different things. This page puts them side by side with the accounting basis, period and geography visible, so you can judge which are comparable — and which are not.
Where is the money actually going?
If we applied Pareto logic — focus 80% of effort where 80% of the problem is — immigration drops off the priority list. The bars below are proportional to the actual £ figures. This is UK Facts’ own analytical framing, not a neutral ranking — judge for yourself whether the comparison holds.
About 35% of the total tax gap. Theoretical estimate of tax not collected, not recoverable revenue.
£78bn total (nominal, not inflation-adjusted) in 32 years — while £60bn+ debt accumulated
Energy Price Guarantee alone — while BP, Shell, Centrica posted record profits of £58bn+ in same year
6.4% of tax due. A theoretical estimate of the difference between tax owed and collected — HMRC recovers only a fraction through compliance activity.
The figure politicians and media fixate on
Hotels + processing + all other asylum costs — total immigration system
EEA migrants contributed net positive £20bn+ to public finances 2001–2011 — the money flowing IN
Immigration: The Full Ledger
Media coverage fixates on the cost side of immigration. Here is the full picture — what immigration actually costs AND what it contributes. Without this, the debate is not honest.
📤 What immigration costs
📥 What immigration contributes
If we deported every non-UK national from the NHS tomorrow…
1 in 5 NHS staff are non-UK nationals. 1 in 3 nurses and doctors are internationally trained. Removing them would:
This is a hypothetical scenario, not a proposed or occurring policy. The workforce numbers above are directly counted; the replacement cost and training-time figures are estimates, not published outturns. What they directly show: the NHS currently relies heavily on non-UK-national and internationally-trained staff — a fact, not an interpretation. Whether the NHS “would not function” without them is this page’s own reasonable inference from that reliance, not itself a measured figure.
The tax gap: £59.2bn theoretical, 2024–25
HMRC publishes an annual "tax gap" — the difference between the tax owed and the tax actually collected. This is not a campaign group's estimate. It is the government's own number.
What closing the tax gap could fund instead (annual)
Source: HMRC Measuring Tax Gaps 2024. Allocations are illustrative of scale, not policy proposals.
Water Companies: 34 Years of Extraction
Water was privatised in 1989. Since then, customers have seen bills rise, sewage dumped in rivers, and companies rack up enormous debts — while shareholders extracted vast sums.
Thames Water: How it happened
Two figures, side by side
Water companies extracted the equivalent of 26 years of current asylum hotel costs — from monopoly customers with no choice — while loading the companies with debt that taxpayers may ultimately have to absorb.
A comparison of scale, not a claim that one figure could substitute for the other: dividends are private payments to shareholders over 33 years; asylum hotel costs are annual public spending in one year. Neither can be redirected into the other.
Energy: Record Profits, Public Bailout
In 2022–23, as households struggled with energy bills, three major energy companies posted combined profits of around £58bn. In the same year, the OBR costed the total net cost of the government's energy support schemes at £51.1bn — money added to the national debt that taxpayers are paying interest on. (Total UK government borrowing that year was £139.2bn, of which the £51.1bn energy support cost was one part — not the whole borrowing figure.)
Company profits (2022)
£32.2bn (Shell) and £23bn (BP) are GBP conversions of their own USD-denominated "adjusted"/"underlying" profit measures (~$39.9bn and ~$27.7bn), not GBP figures the companies themselves reported.
Government response — your money
The numbers, compared
Energy companies posted ~£58bn in profits the same year the OBR costed the government's energy support schemes at ~£51.1bn to stop households freezing. The windfall tax raised ~£3–4bn — a fraction of the profits. The cost of energy support remains on the national debt, accruing interest. By comparison, the asylum hotel bill is roughly 17× smaller than the energy subsidy figure.
Executive Pay: 122 Workers to One CEO
The High Pay Centre tracks FTSE 100 CEO pay annually. The ratio has grown from roughly 60:1 in 1998 to 122:1 today — and the gap is compounding.
The ratio
Source: High Pay Centre CEO Pay Report 2025
Water company bonuses blocked by Ofwat
In 2023–24, Ofwat blocked 73% of water company executive bonus payments from being charged to customers. Six companies were subsequently banned from paying bonuses at all from 2024–25 under the Water (Special Measures) Act 2025.
Source: Ofwat enforcement decisions 2023–25
What the Pareto principle tells us
The figures differ greatly in scale. Comparing them side by side helps readers judge which areas could make the largest difference to the public finances.
Frequently covered relative to £ scale
- →Asylum hotel costs: £3.1bn/yr (NAO/Home Office)
- →"Illegal" immigration via small boats: ~£500m/yr processing costs
- →Migrants "taking jobs": not supported by employment data
- →Migrants "using public services": while contributing net positive £20bn+
Larger by £ scale, less frequently covered
- ✓Corporation Tax gap: ~£21bn/yr theoretical, about 35% of the total gap (HMRC, 2024-25)
- ✓Water company dividends: £78bn nominal extracted over 34 years (FT analysis)
- ✓Energy bailout: £51.1bn cost of government energy support (OBR) same year companies made £58bn profit
- ✓FTSE 100 CEO pay: 122× median worker — fourth year at record high
- ✓Total tax gap: £59.2bn/yr theoretical (HMRC 2024-25) — a measure of tax not collected, not a recoverable sum
A note on media and political framing
This page does not argue immigration has no cost — it does, and those costs are documented above. It sets the cost and revenue figures above — asylum accommodation, the corporate tax gap, water company dividends, and energy sector profits and bailouts — at comparable scale, so readers can compare their relative size directly rather than encounter them in isolation.
Media and political attention to these figures is not proportional to their scale. Large companies routinely run lobbying, public-affairs, and advertising operations; individual welfare or asylum claimants generally do not have comparable access to media or policy channels. Readers can draw their own conclusions about what that difference means for how these issues are covered.
All sources — primary official data
- HMRC Measuring Tax Gaps 2024 — gov.uk/government/statistics/measuring-tax-gaps
- Home Office Annual Report 2023–24 — assets.publishing.service.gov.uk
- NAO Home Office Overview 2024–25 — nao.org.uk
- OBR Energy Support Cost Analysis — obr.uk
- UCL CReAM Fiscal Effects of Immigration — cream-migration.org/files/FiscalEJ.pdf
- Migration Observatory — NHS Workforce — migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk
- NHS Workforce Statistics September 2023 — digital.nhs.uk
- Financial Times — water dividends £78bn (nominal); University of Greenwich real-terms recalculation ~£61.8bn — gala.gre.ac.uk
- Ofwat — Thames Water enforcement decisions — ofwat.gov.uk
- Ofwat — executive bonus rulings 2023–25 — ofwat.gov.uk/prp-june-25
- High Pay Centre CEO Pay Report 2025 — highpaycentre.org
- Guardian — BP profits 2022 — theguardian.com
- Guardian — Shell profits 2022 — theguardian.com
- Guardian — British Gas profits 2023 — theguardian.com
- We Own It — Thames Water history — weownit.org.uk