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Every British household is staring down a £20,000 liability from the immigration surge that took place under Boris Johnson and his Conservative successors, according to a new report by Reform UK that accuses the Tories of leaving a "fiscal time bomb" buried in the public finances.

The analysis, put together by Reform's policy director Amar Johal and titled The Cost of the Boriswave, centres on the 1.6 million people who arrived in the UK between 2021 and 2024 and are now on course to be granted indefinite leave to remain. Once that status is conferred, they gain unrestricted access to the welfare state - and Reform has calculated the cumulative cost of supporting them, funding their NHS care and building the infrastructure their presence requires at £622.5billion in real terms, spread across six decades to 2085.

To put that in context: the sum is equivalent to running the NHS for three years, or funding the defence budget for a decade.

Zia Yusuf, Reform's home affairs spokesman, said: "We are standing on the edge of a fiscal disaster. The Boriswave is a legacy of Tory incompetence and Labour's open border ideology. Reform UK will stop the rot, protect the taxpayer and ensure that British households aren't forced to pick up the £20,000 tab for a decade of failed Westminster policy."

The origins of the crisis, Reform argues, lie in a deliberate policy choice, reports The Telegraph. When Covid drained the workforce, Johnson threw open the immigration system to compensate - a decision that drove net migration to levels not seen in modern British history. The numbers tell their own story: the annual inflow between 2021 and 2024 was running at more than twice the pace of the decade before, culminating in a record 944,000 net arrivals in the twelve months to March 2023.

Across Johnson's tenure and those of his successors, 3.8 million long-term visas were reportedly issued, yielding a net population gain of 2.6 million. Somewhere between 1.6 and 2.2 million of those arrivals will eventually clear the bar for indefinite settlement, bringing with them the full suite of state entitlements.

Reform's report characterised this as a fundamental breach of trust - four elections fought on promises to cut migration, four terms that delivered the opposite. The party also flagged a structural problem with the makeup of the cohort: the majority did not arrive as skilled workers, with just one in six holding a work visa.

Yusuf added: "The British people voted for Brexit to take back control of our borders, yet the Tories opened the floodgates and left a fiscal time bomb under the desks as they left. This wasn't just mass migration - it was the deliberate importation of unprecedented numbers of low-wage, high-dependency people that is about to bankrupt the British taxpayer."

Mahmood has moved to limit the damage by pushing to extend the period migrants must wait before qualifying for permanent settlement.

But the plan has run into resistance from within Labour's own ranks, with a rebellion fronted by Angela Rayner threatening to water down the measures significantly. If Starmer gives ground, Reform argues, the taxpayer exposure it has identified becomes all but inevitable.

The party's alternative is unambiguous. Indefinite leave to remain would be scrapped and replaced with a rolling five-year visa requiring renewal. Entry thresholds would be set at salary levels substantially above current requirements.

Welfare access for foreign nationals would be removed. And Britain would exit the European Convention on Human Rights.