Tory MP Turns Whistle-blower on Curious Case of the Vanishing Government Migration Statistics

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - DECEMBER 18: People gather outside UK Home Office during a demons
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Oliver JJ Lane

An informed debate on mass migration is being stifled because a wide range of official statistics are being withheld by the government, a Member of Parliament complains.

A Conservative Member of Parliament is becoming a surprise emerging voice in the migration debate, taking a methodical approach to determining the true costs of different kinds of migration to Britain and sounding the alarm as yet more useful data is withdrawn, making a national “sensible discussion” on issues more difficult. The source of this dissent is all the more surprising given the source, Neil O’Brien MP, is otherwise close to the government and an ally to centrist figures like George Osborne and the now Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Writing privately on his own Substack, O’Brien vented his frustration at the receding availability of quality immigration data from the government’s own departments, revealing data on the amount of paid per nationality of taxpayer in the country, and data on welfare claims by nationality had been “discontinued”. These joined other statistics, the Parliamentarian said, which had already been deleted, including arrests by nationality, the immigration status of prisoners, detailed data on current prisoners’ criminal histories, and even real fundamentals like the population of the UK by country of birth and nationality.

The UK also compared badly with other European states which release high-quality data about migration, allowing intelligent and informed debate on matters of national importance. Indeed, O’Brien wrote last month that: “Sensible countries such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany do a much better job than the UK of measuring the net tax contribution of different groups of migrants.”

Compounding the problem, he said, is the fact a lot of the data which is available isn’t very good, either. O’Brien wrote the situation “makes it hard to be confident of the stats that do exist: I have written before about how estimates of the number of people here from EU countries turned out to be 50% out, and about the gap of a million people between census and net migration data over the last 20 years.”

It is “perfectly reasonable” to want access to this data, he said, much of which O’Brien noted the government actually collects and holds but refuses to release, even to a government-supporting Member of Parliament like himself. Further, he said it wasn’t even clear if these changes had political sign-off, or is just the work of civil servants and the gaps in the data.

Without this data, false assumptions can be made about different kinds of migration, and can even lead to situations where policymakers end up treating arrivals from all nations as equal, as they don’t have access to the information that would permit intelligent, rational differentiation. He characterised this as assuming that all migration is equal in leading to “some sort of economic bonanza; a position that is increasingly untenable. It also treats migrants as homogeneous, when data reveals huge diversity.”

The politician wrote in a column for The Times that:

We can also see from other sources of data that there is huge variation between different groups of migrants. Via a Freedom of Information request to HM Revenue & Customs I have obtained new data on earnings by nationality. In general, citizens of richer countries earn more: people from western Europe and anglosphere countries are high earners. Citizens of poorer countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Bangladesh, generally earn less. That said, there are variations: Indian citizens earn much more than people from neighbouring countries.

There are also huge variations in rates of employment. Overall, working-age people (aged 20-64) who were born in the UK had a higher rate of employment than people who migrated to the UK. This should give pause to those who argue that all types of migration are always an economic benefit… For people born in countries such as Bangladesh and Somalia, the overall rate of employment is low and the rate of full-time employment is very low: in 2021 only 20 per cent and 23 per cent respectively of working-age people from those countries were working more than 30 hours a week, compared with 65 per cent and 71 per cent of those from Poland and New Zealand.

 

The points raised by the Tory MP, whose government has now been in power for nearly 14 years after repeated unfulfilled election-time promises to dramatically cut migration, are certainly not minor points of pedantic data-chasing. Indeed the immigration debate is a top concern for the electorate and migration levels have roared to heights never seen before in British history in recent years, pushing the known resident population up at great speed despite a dwindling national birthrate.

In 2022 it was reported the foreign-born population of Britain had soared to near-ten and a half million in a country of 67 million, and arrivals have only accelerated since then. In 2023 it was revealed net migration — the total increase once those who left the country in the same period are subtracted — was at 672,000 a year, a major blow for the credibility of the government.

Having been elected in 2010 on a promise of reducing migration to “the tens of thousands” a year, net migration is now hitting one million extra people every 19 months. Gross migration — purely a measure of how many new people are coming to the country — is one million new arrivals every ten months.

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