Taking back control of Britain’s borders was a cornerstone of the campaign to leave the European Union.

Ending freedom of movement was supposed to herald a new era of high-skilled immigration to help the economy flourish.

As former Home Secretary Dame Priti Patel put it, Britain wanted the “brightest and best”.

Five years on from quitting the bloc, ministers are under intense pressure to slash record levels of net migration and close a litany of loopholes.

In the year to June 2024, it hit an astonishing 728,000. Alarmingly, this fell from a high of 906,000 in the previous year.

Key sectors are struggling to fill vacancies and confidence in the immigration system has been shredded.

And to illustrate the point, in the first six months of 2024, the Home Office handed out 1,063 health and care visas to workers from Zimbabwe.

They brought with them 10,670 dependents. Karl Williams, Research Director at the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, pointed out “that’s 10 dependants for every, likely minimum wage, social care worker”.

Britain is in the midst of a housing crisis, with demand greatly outstripping supply, agonising waits for GP appointments and clogged-up roads.

But how did we get here?

Net migration stood at 226,000 when Boris Johnson pledged his 2019 manifesto to reduce it over the course of the Parliament.

In January 2021, Mr Johnson’s government introduced the points-based immigration system.

Designed to replace freedom of movement after Brexit, EU citizens were for the first time in decades subject to the same immigration rules as citizens from the rest of the world.

The Home Office’s Impact Assessment, published in November 2020, stated the number of EU citizens moving to the UK would fall by between 80,000 and 90,000 per year over the first 10 years.

In contrast, an additional 30,000 migrants from the rest of the world were expected to arrive in the UK each year.

Simply put, the Home Office thought the policy would drive down immigration.

But the projections did not factor in Britain’s addiction to cheap foreign labour.

Outlining the problem, Dr Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, said: “When free movement ended, the government said that employers would have to adjust.

“It turns out what this meant was that other employers would have to adjust.

“Where workers are directly or indirectly employed by the government, there has been much less enthusiasm to restrict. This has meant the public sector has increasingly dominated the skilled work visa system.”

Net migration soared after the Covid pandemic, fuelled by a surge in arrivals on Skilled Worker visas and an influx of international students.

Concerned about severe shortages in the number of carers, the Government opened up the immigration system to social care workers.

But experts believe this became a back-door route into the UK.

And the Conservatives, critically, as Dame Priti admitted in a combative interview on Thursday, should have trained more people in the UK to fill gaps in the labour market.

The consequence?

The Home Office granted 350,000 Health and Care visas in 2023, compared to 118,000 skilled visas in other sectors.

This means the share of Skilled Worker visas going to health and care roles jumped from 58% in 2022 to 75% in 2023.

Outlining how it became a back-door route into the UK, former Chief Inspector of Borders David Neal revealed a quarter of foreign care workers are abusing UK visa rules by working illegally in other industries.

Mr Neil, in a bombshell report, said his inspectors found migrants with care visas working illegally in two out of eight enforcement visits between August and October last year.

The borders watchdog said the proportion was representative of others on the care visas in the UK.

Mr Neal also found that the Home Office had issued 275 visas to a care home that did not exist and 1,234 to a company that stated it had only four staff when given a licence to operate.

Reform UK Deputy Leader Richard Tice added: “We need to take advantage of the much bigger opportunities, and also to make Brexit work for British citizens.

“Actually, if you restrict the labour supply, if you have net zero immigration, which is what we want, then guess what? Wages will go up for British citizens.

“Opportunities will grow. You should only welcome highly skilled, highly qualified people who speak the language, who want to integrate and who want to work.

“Not this lunacy where we’ve just seen in recent days where you’ve got like 15,000 health and social care workers and 60,000 dependants coming with them, not working.”

The ONS this week predicted migration will add another five million people to the population in the next seven years.

The alarming projection prompted calls for urgent action.

And the fifth anniversary of Brexit is a stark reminder that millions voted to leave the EU to regain control of Britain’s border.

Because failing to do so will create what Brexit champion Nigel Farage described as the “biggest issue that faces our country.”