Oxford University analysts have warned that the government’s latest immigration figures may be inaccurate by up to 35,000 people.
According to Dr Martin Ruhs, director of the University of Oxford’s migration observatory, COMPAS, any statistics based on last year’s net migration figure would be misleading due to the way in which they were calculated.
The Office of National Statistics (ONS) unveiled that last year 216,000 people entered the UK. However this figure was in fact a central estimate in a range from about 181,000 to 251,000 people. With high margins of error, the government’s claim of a drop in immigration by 36,000 migrants over 2010 has been described as “statistically insignificant” with the actual figure being lower or higher by anything up to 35,000 people.
In the wake of David Cameron and Teresa May’s wishes to reduce the net migration figure to just 100,000 people per year, these inaccuracies will doubtlessly raise concerns about statistics on immigration and the methods used to calculate them. “In simple terms, the Government could miss the “tens of thousands” target by many tens of thousands and still appear to have hit it,” Dr Ruhs said, “conversely the Government could hit, or even exceed its target and still appear to have missed it.”
He added, “There is a constant desire among policy makers in all parties, the press and other interest groups in having ‘hard’ facts and specific numbers about migration, but the reality is that sometimes these are simply not available. The uncertainty around the official migration estimates means that the figures need to be used and interpreted with great care.”
These latest worries about monitoring migration may also have an impact on the current population debate that COMPAS has been following over the past few months. An e-petition to cap the UK population to not exceed 70 million has already garnered over 140,000 signatures with campaigners wishing the government to come down hard on immigration to achieve this.
In July, Dr Scott Blinder, Senior Researcher at the Migration Observatory said, “We cannot base major policy decisions on a finger-in-the-air decision to aim for one round number or another. Policy needs to be based on evidence. At this stage there simply isn’t enough to even debate what is at stake.”
Concerns over the accuracy of immigration statistics can only reinforce COMPAS’s worries of both the consequences of trying to cap populations and the folly of trying to draw conclusions from vague estimates.
In a recent press release Dr Ruhs commented, “The uncertainty in the UK’s migration estimates also means that it is very difficult to assess how well the government is progressing toward its target of reducing net-migration to the ‘tens of thousands’, or to evaluate the effects of specific policy changes.”
