Jul 23, 2025
With migration continuing to make headlines in the media, we unpack what actually defines a “migrant”, and how the UK’s largest producer of official statistics goes about counting them. We also shed light on the misuse of migration figures.
Transcript
MILES FLETCHER
Hello and a very warm welcome to a new series of Statistically Speaking - the official podcast of the UK Office for National Statistics. This is where we hear from the people producing the nation's most important numbers, about how they do it and what the statistics are saying.
Now it's hard to think of one statistic that could be said to have been more influential these past few years than net international migration. Suffice to say it's the one ONS statistic that probably draws more media attention than any other.
But to fully understand the migration figures, and the swirling debate around them, we'd say it pays to know a little about how they are put together. And the first thing you need to know about that is what, or who, is a migrant in the first place. As usual, to unpack and explain the migration statistics we have the top experts from the ONS and beyond. Mary Gregory is director of population statistics here at the ONS. Madeleine Sumption is director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, and new chair of the National Statistician’s Advisory Panel on Migration. And to help us understand how the numbers are used and abused in public debate, we're also delighted to welcome Hannah Smith, senior political journalist at fact checking charity Full Fact. Welcome to you all.
Madeleine, to
start with you if I may, with that fundamental
question, quite simply, what is a
migrant?
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
Well, there
are actually
lots of
different definitions of a migrant and we use different definitions at
different points in time. The standard definition of migration that
we use in this country is long term migration, so people moving for
at least 12 months, and so the Office for National Statistics figures on
immigration, emigration and net migration
are
all using that
definition.
And people in
that data, they're migrants regardless of
whether they are British or not British.
So you could
have a British person who's gone to live overseas for a few
years and coming back they would be
counted, in theory, at least in the data, as a migrant. There are other
definitions though that are very useful for policy. So sometimes people
talk about migrants, meaning people who don't have British
citizenship,
and the value
of that is that these are
people who are subject to immigration
control, effectively that the Home Office is regulating their
status. But it's also sometimes quite useful not
to look at whether someone's a citizen now, because of course
people can change their citizenship, and many migrants to the UK do
become British citizens.
So it can be
useful to look at whether someone has migrated in the past. The
standard definition for that is whether someone is born abroad. But now we've got
all these exciting new data sets
from
administrative data,
and so there's a new definition that's creeping in and being used a
lot, which is someone who was a non-citizen at the time they
registered for their National Insurance Number, regardless of whether
they've subsequently become a British citizen.
So it's a bit confusing sometimes for
the external user, because for various
reasons,
we have
to have all
of these
different definitions. You just have
to know which
one you're looking at at any point in time.
MILES
FLETCHER
But the basic headline definition, as far as the ONS is concerned -and I guess internationally too because it's important that these figures are comparable- is that it is a person traveling from one country to another for a period of 12 months.
MADELEINE SUMPTION
That's right
MILES FLETCHER
And I guess that is something that is
perhaps not
widely understood.
People understand that migration has a degree of permanence, so
they move from one country to another, and yet you can be a migrant
in quite a sort of transient way.
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
That’s right, we have short term
migrants as well.
So we have a
lot of people who come to this country to do seasonal work. For
example, they spend up to six months in the country. Then you have
people who are long term migrants by the ONS
definition and they may spend two to three
years here, for example, if they're a worker or an international
student.
So you're right. I think in people's
minds, often when they think about who
is a migrant and who comes to mind, they will
typically think of someone who is moving permanently. But
actually a
lot of migrants to the UK only stay for a couple
of
years.
MILES
FLETCHER
And none of these people, when it
comes to measuring them, none of these people arrive
Paddington Bear style with labels around
their necks
saying “I am a
migrant”.
The
ONS
in measuring
migration has
to classify
whether these people qualify or not.
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
That's true,
and that is very tricky. And it's something I think the non-technical user of the
statistics finds it difficult to appreciate quite
how hard it is for ONS to work out who is a migrant or
not. Because we have millions of people crossing our borders every year, most of them
not migrants. We have tourists or people who come in to visit
family members. There are all sorts of people and reasons why those people come and
go,
so
ONS
is really looking
for the needle in the haystack, and a relatively small
share of people who
are crossing the borders are actually migrating.
MILES
FLETCHER
Well, that seems a good moment to
bring in the person who is
in charge of finding that needle in the
haystack statistically. Mary, tell us how we approach
this task. Perhaps start off by explaining how we
used to do it.
MARY GREGORY
Previously we used a survey
called the International Passenger Survey, and there we would ask a
sample of people as they came into the country, or as they left the country,
what their intentions were, and we'd be able to provide very early
estimates based on people's intentions to stay or to
leave.
MILES
FLETCHER
This is
people at airports and other ports of
entry, ferry ports, for example, simply
approaching people as they wander along the corridors,
almost in
a random sort of
way.
MARY
GREGORY
Exactly that, you might have seen
them.
If you
have
travelled through an
airport you may have seen a desk that sometimes says
Office for National Statistics. And there
would sometimes be people there with very carefully scheduled
timetables to make sure that we collect a good cross section of
people.
MILES
FLETCHER
So
the International Passenger Survey is essentially a
big sample survey.
Nothing wrong with that, and yet, the number of people being
stopped at airports who did actually
identify themselves as being migrants was
quite small, and that made for some very broad-brush estimates didn't
it?
MARY
GREGORY
Yes, as you
can imagine, people travel through airports or ports for
many different
reasons, and
a lot of those people traveling will be traveling for a holiday or
business or to visit family. And
so the
proportion of those people who are actually
going to
become residents or leaving for more than 12 months is
very
small, which
makes it really
difficult to
pick up a good sample of those
people.
MILES
FLETCHER
And
because it's fair to say the
International Passenger Survey was never set up to
measure migration in the first place, and that was something
ONS
found itself
pointing out for a long, long time before things
actually changed.
MARY GREGORY
For a number
of years we made clear that it was being stretched beyond its
original purpose, and that it was the best measure we had
at the time but now we think we can do
better. And I think one other really important aspect of that is
understanding that the survey was asking about people's intentions,
and intentions don't always match reality of what we then
see.
MILES
FLETCHER
Because you might arrive as a
student, end up working, settling, starting a
family...
MARY
GREGORY
Yes.
Or you might
find that you've arrived planning to stay for a year and then change
your mind and you've left again. So it could go in either
direction.
MILES
FLETCHER
So the case
for change was strong. What has changed? How is migration measured
now?
MARY
GREGORY
So now we
have a variety of different ways to measure depending on the
nationality of the people arriving. So for anybody from outside the
EU, we have good data around visas from
the Home
Office, so we can use that to
understand who is coming and what their reasons for travel are, and
we can come on to that a little bit later. For people within the
EU, that was a bit more difficult because prior to
exiting the EU
nobody needed a
visa. And so at the moment, we use administrative data, so that's
data collected for other purposes, and we use data from DWP, so the
Department for Work and Pensions, to understand who has come into
the country and who is staying in the country for more than 12 months. And for
British nationals, we still, at the moment, use the
International Passenger Survey, but we hope to change
that very soon.
MILES
FLETCHER
And essentially, the last use of the
IPS, as far as migration is concerned, is to capture British
passport holders leaving the country because nobody else is
counting them out.
MARY
GREGORY
That's right,
and it's actually just stopped collecting that data. So we will
move to the new methods very soon.
MILES
FLETCHER
Okay, so how
successful would you say this shift has
been?
MARY
GREGORY
I think we've
definitely improved the data we can provide. It's
a better reflection of people's
behaviours. We know that because we've
compared the different methods and looked against the census and
how the population has changed there. But there are also other
advantages as well. So we can now look a lot more at why
people have come to the UK, or which
are
the people who are
leaving, so we know more about the reasons for migration as
well.
MILES
FLETCHER
Madeleine, you run what's recognized as
one of the leading think tanks in this area. How much of an improvement is the
current system?
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
I think the
data that we have, particularly on non EU citizens, is much better
than it was in the past. Just to give an example, back in
the early 2010s there was a big political debate about what the
right level of net migration should be, and the government had a
target of getting net migration down to under 100,000 from where it
was. It was
around 200 to
300 thousand at the time. So of course, the
biggest question was, how do we do this? And the problem was that,
based on those old data, we had no idea how many students were
leaving the country. If someone came on a student visa we maybe
caught them coming in but there were various problems.
We just couldn't measure accurately enough the students going out.
And so this most basic of questions, how can the government meet
its net migration target, was not possible to answer with
the data.
Fast forward
now ten years, and at least for non EU
citizens, we now have pretty detailed data so we can say,
okay, this number of people came
in on student visas, this share of them left, that share is
actually a bit lower than people were expecting. So those are quite
interesting data. At the moment we can do the same for work
visas, family members, refugees - so that's a dramatic
improvement.
There's still
work to do I
think on EU citizens. The ONS is measuring quite high
levels of both EU immigration and emigration, of people who don't
seem to be coming on visas and probably have a status from before
Brexit, but we don't have a great sense of that. And as Mary
mentioned, we currently don't really have any data on British
citizens migrating, so that will need to be fixed. But yeah, I
think the overall picture on immigration and emigration is much
better than it was. Separately in the system, there
are some challenges, let's say, with the surveys that give us data
on the population of people in the country, their characteristics
and so forth. And that, I think, has deteriorated a little
but
hopefully
will
come back on
track.
MILES
FLETCHER
And
bedding in the new
system has brought about the need for some pretty big revisions.
And that, of course, brings challenges doesn't
it.
Around confidence in
the numbers when you have to revise by several hundred thousand
the number of people
that have been classified as migrants. And you get these sort of
headlines about the ONS, you know, missing the population of Cambridge or
wherever it was. But it wasn't a question of missing
people as such, was it? It was just getting better data to
understand which of the people coming and leaving should actually
be classified as a migrant.
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
Yes.
There were a
number of issues there. There were a couple of cases where it was a
case of missing people. There were some Ukrainians, for example,
that got lost in the data. But that was a relatively small part of
the overall revisions. Mostly, I think there's a challenge, and
this challenge is not going to go away entirely but I think that the situation
is improving, that when people's behaviour is changing the ONS still has to
make assumptions about how long people are going to stay if they
want to produce the data quickly. And so when you have a big policy
change, you've got new groups of migrants coming in who don't
necessarily behave, you know, leave and arrive after the same
amounts of time as the previous groups of people who came in. Then
you're more likely to have some revisions. And that's one of the
things we've seen over the past few
years.
MILES
FLETCHER
Let's trace
the story of migration, if we can, just over the course of this
century so far because it's been one of, if not
the biggest, political
stories.
And you might
argue, one of the factors that has determined the course of
political events in this country. Obviously the ONS is not a political
organization, but its figures do tend to have an enormous influence
in that direction. Migration really became a big
issue in that sense around about the
early part of the 21st century when countries were joining the
EU from the old Eastern Bloc. And suddenly there was a perception
not only that there were large numbers of people
arriving as a result of EU enlargement, but that the ONS was struggling to
actually keep track of them as well.
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
Yeah. I mean,
I would say that the increase in migration was even a few years earlier than
that.
The EU enlargement was one of the
biggest events in migration in the last 30 years
but
there had
already been a bit of an uptick in non EU migration, even from the
late 1990s, and that is something that we
saw across a number of countries. So the UK has been a major
destination country, and is, if you look at comparable European
countries, towards the top of the pack. But interestingly, we've
seen some broadly similar trends in quite a lot of high income
countries towards higher levels of migration. And that, of course,
you know, as you've said, it's made migration much more salient in
the political debate, and it's greatly increased the demand for
accurate migration stats. And not just stats on the overall
numbers, which of course are important, but
really understanding who is coming to the UK. You know, what kinds
of visas are they on? What do we know about their characteristics,
their nationalities? How do they do when they get
here...So I think that the demand for
good migration statistics is just much higher than it was at a time
when the UK experienced relatively limited
migration.
MILES
FLETCHER
It's arguable
that it was indeed rising EU migration that actually led to the
events that led to Brexit. What has changed in terms of migration
flows because of Brexit?
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
Well, the
changes have been really big actually. I mean
before Brexit quite a substantial share of all migration was from
EU countries. After the referendum, even before the UK left the
EU but after the referendum
vote had been
taken,
there was
already a decline in EU migration for a
host of reasons including the exchange rate and so forth. So in
some ways Brexit did what it was expected
to do
in reducing EU
migration to the UK, because when free movement ended
we saw quite a
dramatic decrease in EU migration. And net migration from EU
countries is now actually negative. So we've got the EU citizen
population in the UK shrinking. But what was unexpected about
Brexit was that then there was quite a big increase in non EU
migration for various reasons. So partly policy liberalisations
that at the time didn't necessarily look like a massive
liberalization, but I think that the take up from migrants was much
more enthusiastic than perhaps the government had expected. Lots of
things came together. More international students, more
workers, the war in Ukraine of course and lots of Ukrainians coming to
the UK. And all of those came together
at the same time and meant that we then ended up
unexpectedly with these record high levels of net migration,
peaking at just over 900,000 between 2022 and
2023.
And now, of course,
the numbers are coming right down again.
So
we had a
record increase, we've then had a record decline
to back to what are actually still pretty high levels of over
400,000.
So we've
really been on a roller coaster ride in terms of the migration
patterns in the last few years.
MILES
FLETCHER
Yes, and
statistically the contrast between what's happened recently is that
these migrants have become much more conspicuous and much more
measurable because they're being covered
by visa
data, whereas previously, the EU migrants in the early part
of the century
weren't actually picked up until the until the census in 2011 were
they?
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
Yes and my hope is that
because we're now
measuring migration using visa data, when we get to the next census
hopefully it will mean that those revisions - especially given
that
we'll have planned
revisions over the next few years to the data - the hope is that that will mean
we won't need such big revisions at the next census
because we will have
had a slightly more accurate measure between the
censuses.
MILES
FLETCHER
And I
guess the
three elements in this recent wave of migration that have attracted
particular
attention, yes, people have come to work and people have come to
study as previously, but in this latest
wave, people were bringing more of their dependents with them
weren't they? Perhaps because they were coming from further
afield?
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
There's a bit
of a puzzle about precisely why that increase in the number of
dependents happened when I think it seems like there were probably
two main factors. You've got international students bringing family
members. We saw a shift in the countries as you mentioned, the countries
that students were coming from. A lot more students from Nigeria,
and they're more likely to come with their family members. We also saw a
really big increase in the number of people coming to the UK as
care workers after the government opened up a
route for care workers. And so in one year alone, in
2023,
there were visas
issued to over 100,000 care workers, and they brought more than
100,000 family members with them, partners and children, that is.
But that's now changing, because in response to these changes the
government then introduced restrictions on the migration of family members,
specifically of care workers and international students. So we've
seen over the last year that fewer people are now bringing their family
members with them.
MILES
FLETCHER
Interesting
example of
better data enabling a policy response in that
sense.
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
Yes, and I think it has been very
helpful that we've had these data on dependents. Ten years ago we would not necessarily have
known.
We would have
seen that migration was high but it wouldn't have been very
easy to distinguish whether people were coming as the partner of an
international student or the partner of a health and care worker
and now we do have those figures which is incredibly
helpful for the policy debate.
MILES
FLETCHER
Oh, Mary, one
thing we haven't spoken about so far is the impact of COVID. How
did the system cope with that period? In measuring the negligible flows
to start with, but then the turning on the taps again as
things returned to normal...
MARY
GREGORY
I think in
terms of measuring the statistics it was a massive challenge
because the
International Passenger Survey stopped
and then it was
agreed that it wouldn't restart measuring
migration,
and it
actually accelerated our progress to what is now a better
measure, but it happened under very
difficult circumstances. So we very quickly moved to using
administrative data. So data collected by government already to
help us measure. And of course there was so much going on then
that added to the challenge. Exiting the
EU,
changes to the
immigration system etc. So it was really important we were very
careful about how we make sure we understood what had caused the changes and how we
measured it really
accurately.
MILES
FLETCHER
There was
indeed another test of the credibility of the ONS migration
estimates when it was announced that a very large number of people had
applied for settled status just as we were about to leave. These
are EU citizens applying for settled status in the UK
just as we're about
to leave the EU. How do we reconcile those two
very different estimates, because a lot of people use them to
suggest that there were far more people here
than you've been telling us for all these
years.
MARY
GREGORY
What we can do is we can look at the
data sources available to us. The census is a really valuable
source in that respect because it gives us the most
comprehensive view of the whole population for England and Wales,
done by ONS. Obviously, Scotland and
Northern Ireland are done by their own statistical offices but we
can look at that to get a much better understanding of the full
components of the population. But of course, it was really
difficult. When there was free movement across the EU we wouldn't
know for sure how many people have come and how many people have
left. And that's actually become a little bit easier in terms
of a
statistical
viewpoint, because now people do need to have visas in order to
travel unless they've got settled status
already.
MILES
FLETCHER
The new
system has been bedding in these last couple of years, and you've
had the unenviable job of announcing some pretty large revisions to
the figures. Have things settled down
now?
MARY
GREGORY
So I think we've made really good
progress on people traveling from outside the EU as
Madeleine already referred to. We know
a lot more about them. We're more confident in that aspect, and we
would hope therefore, that the revisions in future will be much
lower in scale. There will always be some revisions
because we are
making assumptions about people. Just to pause on that
for
a second. We publish
data five months after the reference period, but obviously it's 12
months before somebody meets the definition of being a migrant. So
we have to make some assumptions about who will stay and who won't,
but those are relatively small and should be small in terms of
revisions. So I think with non EU numbers we have made really good
progress and
that is the largest part of the picture. So just to put that in
perspective, in terms of immigration just
over four in five people immigrating in in our latest data are from outside
the EU, so that's positive. Where we do have more work to do is
those people coming from within the EU and British nationals, and
we've got plans to develop the methods for both of those so we will
see revisions coming up in both of those areas. We will put out
more information in the autumn about the progress we've made, and
if they're ready and we think the quality is good
enough, we will implement those methods
in November. Otherwise, we'll wait until the following publication
because for us it's really important that when we do this
we do it
properly.
MILES
FLETCHER
And important for everybody to remember
that the
ONS,
in
the job it
does,
can only make the
best of the information that's made available to it at any given
time.
MARY
GREGORY
Yes absolutely. And I think
especially with the British nationals where there are a lot of
challenges. Because, of course, if you're a British national you
come and go as you please. The other things
that we are looking
to improve are going to be less significant in terms of the
headline numbers but are also really valuable. So if we
can change the methods for EU, for example, we should be able to do
more on people's reason for migration. And we also hope to do more
on breaking down those from outside the EU, to understand a bit
more detail about how long people are staying and if they change
visas,
that kind of
thing.
MILES
FLETCHER
Mary, thank you very much. That seems a good moment to bring in Hannah.
Hannah, then,
from what you've heard, as someone who's in the business of tackling
misinformation and ensuring that debates are
properly understood, what is your assessment of how useful, how
reliable, the ONS migration data
are?
HANNAH
SMITH
Now
as
we've
been hearing from
Madeleine there's been some significant
improvements in the way that the data is collected and published. I
think another thing that can give people confidence is how
transparent the ONS has been with not only the strengths of the
data, but also the limitations and the work they're doing surrounding
ongoing development
with that. I think that's absolutely
key when we're talking about access to
good
information –transparency- understanding what the data can
tell us and what the data
can't
tell us, and what
the ONS is looking to do to change that. I think ultimately this
is,
as
we've
been
hearing, a really
complex issue, and trying to reconcile
that with the fact that it's of massive public interest. And,
as Madeline has been saying, someone who
is not a technical user of the
statistics, it's really important for someone like that
to be able to
understand these issues in a straightforward way, and trying to find that balance
between getting the right level of detail that can be
understandable for a general user is difficult. But I think the ONS
has been really open about the challenges with that, and this
conflict between the idea of timeliness and completeness of
data,
as Mary was just
saying, we don't have complete data at the moment that the first
statistics are published, but obviously the alternative is just to
wait a really long time until that full data is available.
So I think
trying to strike that balance is also key, and something that, like
I say, just being transparent about that is the best way to approach
it.
MILES
FLETCHER
In your work for Full Fact, what do you come across as the major misuses of migration figures, the deliberate misunderstanding of migration figures. And how well equipped Are you to combat those?
HANNAH SMITH
It’s hard to know how much of it is
deliberate misuse of migration figures, and how much of it is, as
you say, due to just misunderstanding the data. I think there
are obviously some
things that we don't know, some information gaps. So,
for example, the scale of illegal migration is something
that's
perhaps a
bit harder to
capture, just by the very nature of it. That's something that we found is
a really
common
theme in the
things that
we're
fact checking. You
know, we've seen surveys that show that a
quite significant proportion
of the public thinks
that the data shows that more people are entering the country
illegally than legally. We fact check politicians who make similar
claims.
So we know
this bad information does cause real harm, and I think
that's
why the information
that the ONS is publishing is really, really
important for
reasoned debate, and just having that information available is the
first step to help counter the bad
information that's out
there.
MILES FLETCHER
You mentioned
illegal immigration or undocumented migration, that by its very
nature is a
tricky one, because it's difficult to accurately
measure isn't it, and to come up with a robust estimate that can
counter exaggerated claims.
HANNAH
SMITH
Yeah, of
course. And we know that some of the people who are arriving in the
country, either undocumented or illegally are captured in the data.
So for
example, the data we have on small boat arrivals, but
it is
ultimately, like you say, hard to estimate. And I
think similarly to what Madeleine was saying earlier about the
different definitions of what constitutes a
migrant.
Different
people will have different views or different understandings of
what constitutes illegal migration. So that's another thing that we
have
to bear in
mind when we're talking about this
issue.
MILES
FLETCHER
And do you
feel you've got the tools to effectively
combat the worst excesses of the Wild West that social media often
is?
HANNAH
SMITH
Yes we do work with social media
companies.
So
we have a
partnership with Meta which allows us to
directly rate misleading content that we
see on their platforms. And we definitely
do see a lot
of content specifically related to migration which thanks to that
partnership we are able to have influence on. But at Full Fact I think we're always calling for improvements
in how better to combat misinformation, not only in this space, but
just generally.
So media
literacy, for example, we think is a really
vital step that's needed to ensure people are
equipped so that they can spot what's fact and what's fiction.
And we've been making a lot of
recommendations in what can be done to improve media literacy to
meet the public's needs. We also think that legislation needs to be
strengthened to tackle this kind of misinformation and
other sorts of harmful misinformation that crop up online.
So yeah, we do have a lot of tools at
our disposal, but we think that the information environment and the
regulations surrounding it could always be
strengthened.
MILES
FLETCHER
That’s interesting. And what sort of
areas do you think it could specifically be strengthened? As far as
the production of statistics are concerned?
HANNAH
SMITH
I think, as I
say, transparency and accessibility is
key. I think perhaps trying
to
anticipate
where
misunderstandings could crop up. A lot of the work we do, or an
approach that we can take with fact checking, is something we call pre
bunking, which is trying to look at what topics are resonating with
the public, what things we think might crop up, and then producing
content that puts the correct information out
there.
Ideally,
trying to get ahead of the bad information. I don't know if I'm going to butcher this saying,
but
a lie gets halfway
around the world before the truth had time to put his boots on. I
think that pre bunking is an effort to try and reverse that. And I think
there's a parallel there with anticipating, as producers of
information, where the misunderstandings might be
likely to fall, and putting content warnings on or health warnings
as prominently as possible, and also making sure that the people
that are using the information, whether that's the media,
politicians, other people, are aware of potential pitfalls to try
and minimize the risk of that spreading to a wider
audience.
MILES
FLETCHER
Survey
information we have from our own sources - the public confidence
in
official
statistics survey - suggests that people who have
heard of the ONS tend to recognize the fact that
it is independent, that we are not subject to political control,
and therefore you might think people should have confidence in the
figures. Is that corroborated by your
experience?
HANNAH
SMITH
That's really
interesting. I'm not entirely sure. I
think from a
fundamental point of view, I think trust in organizations like the
ONS, knowing that you're getting impartial evidence,
knowing that you're getting unbiased
information that's been put through the most robust
scrutiny that it can be, can only be a helpful thing. We
know that trust in politics is at a very low level, so having those impartial
producers of information that we know aren't subject to any political control
or affiliation, I think can only be beneficial for
that.
MILES
FLETCHER
Madeleine, this is where the
National Statistician’s Advisory Panel on Migration comes in, the body that
you chair. Can you just tell us a little about its work? What its
role is?
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
Yes. So
this is a new body
that will advise the ONS on migration statistics. Obviously, the
ONS migration teams have been soliciting expert advice in
various ways
for several years. I
know this because I've been part of that process as well, but the
arrangements are being formalized now, actually building on the
model that I think has worked quite well in some other areas of
migration statistics, like labour market data, for example, to
have a panel of independent experts who help advise on things
like whether
the statistics are really answering the questions that users have.
Obviously ONS has a lot of excellent
statisticians, but they're not expected to be deep in the
weeds of the policy debate and really sort of understanding
exactly how people
want to use the data and so forth.
So the idea
of this panel is to have some of that independent
voice to help ONS shape its vision of
what kinds of data
it can produce. How can it make them more relevant and accessible
to users, that kind of thing?
MILES
FLETCHER
And I guess when you ask most people
whether they think migration does have a role to play,
particularly in modern economies, answering that
question depends on having good data, having data that meets the
needs of experts in economics and so forth.
So we can see
whether indeed, migration is having a positive economic
benefit.
MADELEINE SUMPTION
Yes
there are lots of things that the data
are needed for.
So looking at
the impacts on the economy is one of them that the Office of Budget
Responsibility, for example, uses the migration data when
it's
making its forecast
of how much money there is effectively.
So you know,
how big is the population? What are people likely to be paying in
tax? What are we likely to be spending in addition on services?
Because we have more migrants, more people in the
population.
So it's important for the financial
impacts. It's important for planning public
services. How many school age kids are we
going to have? How's that changing? What do we need
to do to plan school places? And yeah, then it's important for the broader policy
debate as well, understanding
different
categories of
migration, what should the Home Office do? What should other
government departments
do,
and thinking
about how to respond to the impacts of migration.
MILES
FLETCHER
Yeah. And
you can't calculate GDP per head of
population until you know how many heads there
are,
to reduce it
to its most simple terms.
MADELEINE
SUMPTION
Indeed. Yep.
And that's been one of the challenges.
There are more challenges along those lines, when thinking about
the impacts of migration, we're getting a lot more administrative
data,
so data from
basically the records of different government departments and
agencies around the country, that will tell us things like
how many migrants are claiming benefits, or how many migrants are
imprisoned, or any number of things. And it's really
important that if you want to be able to
interpret those statistics, you really must have
a
good idea
of how many
migrants are from different countries,
different
parts of the
world, are in the country in the first
place.
Otherwise you might make your calculations
wrong. And I
think there is still more work to be done in
that area, in
particular looking at population.
We've been talking mostly about
migration in and out of the country. There's still a fair amount more to be
done on making sure that we have really accurate statistics on the number of
people who are here at any one point in
time.
MILES
FLETCHER
Mary, finally from
you
then, do you support
that good
progress has
been made, but important steps are still to
come?
MARY
GREGORY
I think so. I
mean, there's always improvements that can be made. No matter how
good we get, we will always want to do better. But I think
also it's such a privilege, but a huge
responsibility, to work on something so important, and we
don't
take that lightly
in ONS. We know that these numbers
make a difference to so many people, and as Madelene said, the number
of people in the country is a
really important number, but so often the thing
driving that is the migration figure.
So without
the really
good migration data, we
don't
have the
really
good population data, and so we will
keep working on that together as well as we
can.
MILES
FLETCHER
And on that positive note we must come to the end of this podcast. Thanks to you, Mary Madeleine and Hannah, for your time today, and as always, thanks to you at home for listening.
You can subscribe to future episodes of Statistically Speaking on Spotify, Apple podcasts and all the other major podcast platforms. You can also follow us on X, previously known as Twitter, via the @ONSFocus feed.
I am Miles Fletcher, and from myself and producer Steve Milne, until next time, goodbye.
ENDS