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UK migration figures provide a cautionary tale


Bad statistics can fuel bad policies. After pledging in 2010 to reduce annual net migration into the UK from hundreds of thousands to “tens of thousands”, the Conservative government used official migration data for a purpose for which they were never intended, and placed on them a political burden they were never robust enough to bear. Now the Office for National Statistics has downgraded the figures to “experimental”. Yet they helped to create an impression that Britain had lost control of its borders that played into the vote to leave the EU in 2016 and hence, indirectly, into the political chaos it faces today.

The consequences are playing out, too, as the government tries to register the 3m EU citizens living in the UK in preparation for Brexit — especially since last month it floated an end to freedom of movement for EU nationals in the event of a no-deal exit. Complaints that the process for applying for “settled status” is flawed, and reports of EU nationals who are longtime UK residents being turned down, are stoking concerns of a repeat of the Windrush scandal — now involving European, not Caribbean, migrants.

When the ONS tried to count migrants it relied on surveys of international passengers, at ports and airports. Travellers were asked about their intentions — how long they were planning to remain in the country. The headline figures were broadly correct, but this was due to two opposing errors: an underestimation of EU workers and an overestimation of non-EU student migration. EU migrants were more likely to settle than they anticipated, while non-EU students were less likely to stay after completing their course.

This was not the first time the data had been wrong. The ONS underestimated the number of eastern European migrants after the 2004 accession of new EU states, as the statistics agency concentrated its staff at main airports, such as Heathrow, rather than the smaller airports used by budget airlines flying from ex-communist states. The 2011 census revealed there were half a million more immigrants living in Britain than anticipated.

There is, in fact, no perfect way of measuring migration. Some countries, such as Sweden, use population registers that new migrants must join if they wish to access public services. Yet these have flaws too: Germany, which uses a registration system, found in 2013 that there were 1.5m fewer people in the country than thought as migrants were less likely to tell the authorities they were leaving.

Australia counts the number of visas awarded, an option open to the UK if it leaves the EU and is no longer part of its single market. New Zealand has switched to administrative data on border crossings after it found that using landing cards had led migration to be overestimated. Keeping an open border with the Republic of Ireland would make this tricky for the UK.

Proposals to create a UK population register, linked to identity cards, have been previously rejected, partly because of privacy concerns. The ONS plans to improve migration statistics by linking various administrative data sets such as tax data and health service information to track the same people over time. This approach merits exploration. Whatever the difficulties in measuring migration, however, most countries have put less weight on the figures than the UK. Britain now needs better statistics, but above all a sensible debate on migration. Public opinion on the subject is more subtle than thought, as reactions to the Windrush scandal showed. Trying to boil public intuitions on fairness and control down to a single number will not work.



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