by Jon Silverman
New Government figures released this week (22 August) show that nearly 450,000 people have come to live in Britain since the last wave of EU expansion in 2004. This represents more than ten times the number the Government predicted, and the Conservatives have used the figures to argue that there must be restrictions put on the numbers allowed in to Britain when Bulgaria and Romania join the EU on 1 January 2007.
The world of immigration statistics can often seem like a thicket of information and misinformation. In any such situation, however, the search for truth - or at least, reliability - has to start somewhere. So, let’s begin with a body which has earned a reputation for rigour and incorruptibility - the National Audit Office (NAO).
In April 2004, the NAO accepted a commission from the Home Office to examine the accuracy of the quarterly asylum statistics and consider whether changes in the number of applications had had any impact on other forms of migration. The commission came with a tight deadline. The NAO had to deliver its report alongside the publication of the quarterly asylum statistics in May 2004.
The [report]... highlighted a lack of corroborative evidence for the number of failed applicants who were said to have been removed from the UK
Despite the time constraint, this was not simply a paper exercise. NAO staff visited 21 offices around the country, including ports of entry, to look at systems for collecting the raw data. The National Statistician and the Statistics Commission were consulted and advice sought from the Royal Statistical Society as to other experts who might help. The key conclusion the NAO came to was that the published statistics on the number of asylum applications were reliable but likely to be incomplete because some illegal immigrants were not being counted.
There were gaps in the data on asylum seekers supported by the National Asylum Support Service (NASS), which omitted up to 16,000 cases of either single people, or families who were receiving subsistence funding from the Home Office. The NAO also highlighted a lack of corroborative evidence for the number of failed applicants who were said to have been removed from the UK.
The NAO also asked Professor James Salt and James Clarke of the Migration Research Unit at University College London (UCL) to consider whether the data supported the argument that a fall in asylum applications had had an impact on other forms of migration, both legal and illegal.
The two researchers concluded that it was impossible to draw such an inference, mainly because of concerns about the quality of stats taken from the National Insurance Recording System, published by the Department for Work and Pensions, which are fed into the annual figures about migrant workers. The attempt by the UCL team to reach a definitive verdict also foundered on a more familiar rock: the absence of data sources to calculate the number of illegal immigrants in the UK.
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