Migration Statistics

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Nigel Evans

Thursday 26th June 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Jenkin]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As I said, the survey relies on full and frank answers from those being interviewed even to include them. If people say that they are just visiting a relative for a week, they are not counted as migrants. To that extent, the 70,000 range for potential error within the 95% confidence interval is of significant size for the estimate.

If annual immigration is 120,000 or 150,000, there is only a 5% or one in 20 chance that the official figures are on target. The figures could say that the Government are missing their net immigration target by tens of thousands when in fact they are meeting it, or they could show that the UK is meeting its target when in fact it is missing it by tens of thousands. We do not have enough confidence to know. It is clearly a completely inadequate measure of net migration, but we must be careful before dismissing it, because it is all we have.

That degree of confidence applies only to the headline numbers. The ONS estimate simply does not provide sufficient detail to judge properly the social and economic consequences of different types and origins of migration, and the effects of immigration policy on, for example, students or people from particular countries. Nor does it provide any useful idea about international migration in and out of local areas. Efforts to achieve a blunt net migration target are therefore bound to have unintended consequences, such as skills shortages and effects on universities.

The shortcomings of relying on the IPS were highlighted when the 2011 census showed that the population of England and Wales was 465,000 higher than expected, given the recorded number of births and deaths and the estimated level of net migration during the decade since the previous census. The ONS identified several possible causes for the difference but considered that the

“largest single cause is most likely to be underestimation of long-term immigration from central and eastern Europe in the middle part of the decade”,

which of course was not picked up by the international passenger survey. The ONS concluded that the underestimation came partly from taking samples of people from the wrong airports. That is, the IPS sample under-represented airports such as Cardiff and ports such as Newcastle, where more immigrants are coming in than was previously understood.

As a result, this April, the ONS published a revised set of net migration estimates for the United Kingdom for the period 2001 to 2011. Total net migration during that period is now estimated to have been 346,000 higher than previously thought; the original estimate of 2.18 million has been revised to 2.53 million, plus or minus 35,000.

[Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)]

With current technology, there is no reason not to have accurate figures, never mind estimates. Clearly, the most appropriate way to get them is at ports of entry and departure, but I have gone through Heathrow and Gatwick airports and seen enormous queues of people coming in who are non-EU citizens; it is actually quite bad for EU citizens. My only caution is that if we are to get adequate figures, we must ensure that sufficient personnel are made available, so we do not have 24-hour backlogs of people coming through our airports at entry.

[Mr Jenkin]

My hon. Friend highlights the complexity of moving purely to a counting in and counting out system. Only two countries in the world base their immigration and emigration estimates entirely on counting. One is Australia, which is a good example. A less encouraging example is North Korea. However, every other country in the world bases its migration flow estimates on samples, measuring and estimating or a population register. Germany, for example, keeps an up-to-date population register—the equivalent of a census kept constantly up to date—to monitor its migration flows.

We are in a no man’s land at the moment. We neither count effectively nor sample effectively, and even though we have the decennial census, which has provided the correction of 346,000, that does not resolve the problem between censuses. The underestimation of net migration was identified only by the census on a 10-yearly basis, so the ONS is unable to revise its annual estimates of immigration and emigration as components of migration during the same period, even though it knows that they must be wrong. As a result, for the years from 2001 to 2011, our best estimate of net migration each year is not equal to our best estimate of immigration minus our best estimate of emigration. We are into an Alice in Wonderland world of numbers in which we know that our official figures for each year are wrong, but they cannot be changed, as we have no other sources to use.

In all probability, the actual population of the country will be even larger than that recorded in the census. Many people in the country do not consider themselves to be “residents” and thus decide not to complete the census form. Many others, who have overstayed or are in the country illegally for other reasons, are most unlikely to complete the form. Immigration will thus have been even higher in the last decade than was estimated by the census.

The PASC concluded that the UK’s immigration statistics are not fit for purpose. There was some pushback from the Home Office in reaction to our report last summer, but I think we have to regard that as a natural reaction of denial about the failure of the system of immigration statistics that has been building up for decades. The UK Statistics Authority agrees with us in that respect, saying in its response to our report:

“The limitations of the International Passenger Survey (IPS) in particular and UK international migration statistics in general, especially for local areas, have long been known and debated. The Statistics Authority believes that action must now be taken to address this.”

As I mentioned, when we look at smaller groupings within the 3,000 immigrants identified, such as immigrants from the EU or from specific countries, the system becomes even less reliable, as the 95% confidence interval becomes larger relative to the size of the sample, eventually becoming larger than the sample itself.

Accountability and Transparency in the NHS

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Nigel Evans

Thursday 14th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I am encouraged by the speech from my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) because it shows that accountability is not just about supervising organisations, regulators, targets, safeguards, mechanical things and statistics. Accountability is about creatively getting the intelligence into the system about what is happening and reacting to it positively, welcoming it and generating the complaints so that more intelligence comes into the system. That is the kind of accountability we want.

As Chairman of the Public Administration Committee, I feel I can add a new dimension to the debate because of what we are thinking about in our inquiry on the future of the civil service. We need to ask ourselves, “What does accountability feel like?” We think we know what accountability feels like, but my goodness, it goes up and down a bit. During the previous Parliament we felt very accountable in some periods, every single one of us. What do we want accountability to feel like in the health service? With the greatest respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker), the lawyers must be the last resort. We do not want accountability to be about finger-pointing, blame and holding people to account. Indeed, that is part of the disease that afflicts the health service. We want accountability to be about nursing staff on the ward feeling accountable to each other for sharing information, accountable to the patients and welcoming the information they receive from them, and accountable to their managers and holding them accountable for what they do not feel is being done, in an atmosphere of trust and co-operation.

What is chilling about the Mid Staffordshire story is the question of what accountability felt like in that hospital at that time? To whom did people feel they were accountable. What did they feel they were accountable for? There must have been almost an atmosphere of “Apocalypse Now” in the hospital, in which nobody knew where to turn.

In the evidence we are receiving about the civil service, we have had powerful testimony from an adviser to our Committee, Professor Andrew Kakabadse of Cranfield university, who rather chillingly points out an obvious truth. Very few people who work in a failing organisation do not know that it is failing. Most people in a failing organisation know that it is failing. What is wrong? The answer is that they do not know how to talk about it. They do not know what to say, who to tell—or, if they try to tell people, it will be bad for them—or what to do. So people often just leave failing organisations, saying, “I can’t do anything about it.” I bet most of those on the board of the hospital trust knew it was going wrong and did not know what to do. There is this idea that this was just an isolated case, but it represents a systemic failure. There is absolutely no escaping that.

I remember the Paddington rail crash. One’s instant reaction was, “Well, the driver went through a red light; it must have been his fault,” but everybody knew that there must have been something much more fundamentally wrong. Something was wrong with rail safety. In aviation, when there is a plane crash, it is very rarely the pilot’s fault. Even if it is down to pilot error, that will be down to pilot training and that will be a system failure. We need to look at this issue in an holistic and sensible way.

The reaction of the NHS to the Francis report was immediately to reach for statistics and to start doing things. It immediately started a storm around our local hospital, the Colchester General, by latching on to one statistic and naming it as one of the hospitals being investigated, even though—I have written to Andrew Dilnot at the UK Statistics Authority and got a reply from him—a single statistic should never be used in such a fashion. In fact, the Colchester General is in the top quartile of its class of hospital, so that was entirely unnecessary. My wife has just had a knee replacement in that hospital. I was completely confident that she would get good nursing care and she indeed got very good nursing care.

There is now an uncomfortable atmosphere surrounding this issue. There is an atmosphere of denial, and this relates to Sir David Nicholson. Is he still in denial? Is the system still in denial? Can the system change dramatically enough unless people are seen to take responsibility for the culture? It is difficult to argue that he has not been individually responsible for the broad culture in the national health service that has led to this pass.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I am sure the House wishes Anne Jenkin a speedy recovery.

House of Lords Reform

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Nigel Evans

Monday 27th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Will you look into the House’s sound system? I distinctly heard the right hon. Gentleman the Deputy Prime Minister refer to the size of the House of Lords, when my intervention made no mention of that whatever, so he must have misheard me.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

That is not really worth responding to.

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Nigel Evans

Tuesday 18th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Is it not the case that if there was an attempt to table a wrecking amendment, the Clerks would rapidly describe it as out of order and it would not be selected for debate?

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

All I can say is that all the amendments and new clauses have been chosen in the right and proper way.