Migration Statistics

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Westminster Hall

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

Thank you, Mr Walker, for the opportunity to present to the House the Select Committee on Public Administration’s report of the 2013-14 Session on migration statistics. It has proved one of the most controversial that we have produced during this Parliament.

Migration statistics are of supreme importance to public policy and the debate about immigration in this country. National and local government depend on those estimates in planning public services. For reasons of security, we need to know not only how many people are arriving in and leaving the UK, but who they are. Migration statistics help us understand what is happening in British society and the British economy.

Accurate and reliable migration statistics are also important for public trust. How can the public trust politicians’ promises on immigration if we do not have reliable numbers on which to base our policies? One reason why the debate on immigration has become so toxic is that people no longer believe they are being told the truth; they do not even believe that Governments understand what is happening to their own country.

We conducted our inquiry last year and came to a conclusion that everybody in the know about immigration has understood for years, but been loth to say too clearly for fear of the consequences: the immigration statistics produced by the Office for National Statistics and the Home Office are but blunt instruments for measuring, managing and understanding migration to and from the UK, and they are not fit for purpose.

The current sources of migration statistics were established when migration levels were much lower than they are today. Those sources are not adequate for understanding the scale and complexity of modern migration flows, despite attempts in recent years to improve their accuracy and usefulness. Most people are astonished when they learn how the inadequate estimates that we do have are compiled. When a person checks in or out of the country, their passport is scanned, but they are not counted in or out of the country, even if they are a foreign national. The headline immigration, emigration and net migration numbers are annual estimates based on interviews of about 800,000 people stopped at random at ports and airports each year—a tiny fraction of the overall flow of passengers and people in and out of the UK. The method is called the international passenger survey.

The number of non-UK citizens identified from the sample as migrants entering or leaving the UK each year is fewer than 5,000. Most of the numbers that we hear in the immigration debate are based on that tiny sample of people, many of whom might be reticent, to say the least, about giving full and frank answers about where they have come from, who they are, why they are here and where they are going. To be clear, that group includes people entering and emigrating from the UK, so the sample number of immigrants in the survey may be as small as 3,000.

Unsurprisingly, migration estimates based on the international passenger survey are subject to a large margin of error, known to statisticians as the confidence interval: that is, the degree of confidence that it is possible to have about a particular margin of error. As we all know, the Government have stated that they intend to bring net migration—the difference between annual immigration into and emigration out of the UK—down from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. That is not a 90% cut; in fact, it amounts to about 50%.

On the ONS calculations for net migration as measured by the unadjusted IPS estimate, the 95% confidence interval is plus or minus 35,000, meaning that we can only be 95% certain that the true figure lies within 35,000 of the estimate either way. In other words, the error range is 70,000.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the error margin he gave is one of random variation in a bell curve distribution? Another potential source of variation could be systematic bias in the survey. For instance, if immigrants are not likely to complete the survey or if they say that they are not planning to stay for a long time when they actually are, that would make the margins vary even more.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz]

Absolutely. I agree with the hon. Gentleman: of course it can be done. It is an easy win for this Minister, who is a hard-working Minister—I think he has now been in the House three times this week and there is another Adjournment debate before six o’clock; I do not know whether he knew that. It is an easy win for him to announce this change. It needs the co-operation of security staff at Heathrow airport, of course, as well as that of BAA and others, including the airlines, but it can be done.

When I went on my last visit abroad and I gave my details to the people from the Office for National Statistics—they wanted to know my details; I do not know whether the Minister had sent someone to the airport to check whether I was coming back or not—I referred to this report by the Public Administration Committee. They were extremely grateful. They knew about it and they said, “When you go back, please remind everybody that we would like to do this survey for everybody, but we’re not given the resources to be able to do that.” I then asked whether it was the quick survey or the long survey and they said, “We’re happy to do the quick survey, but we would like to do everyone rather than the limited number that we do,” so there is a willingness. People want to be helpful. It is not a case of civil servants and other officials wanting to thwart the will of Parliament and the will of the British people; they want to help. Given that and given the arrangements that are made at airports, why on earth can we not bring this change into effect before 7 May 2015?

[Mark Reckless]

Can I clarify what is being suggested here? I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) was talking about quadrupling the size of the international passenger survey. Is the right hon. Gentleman suggesting that, instead of quadrupling the survey, it should be made universal? If so, would we then not be talking about the count, and would there not be a better way of doing that than having a separate person with a clipboard asking questions?

[Keith Vaz]

I say to the hon. Gentleman, who is an assiduous member of the Home Affairs Committee, that we should be open to offers. Let us look and see what is available and what is the best way to do things. That approach may not be the best way to do things—I like what the Public Administration Committee has recommended—but it would certainly be an improvement on the existing situation.

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman intervened, because he and I went on new year’s day to check how many Romanians were arriving at Luton airport. That was because we did not trust the ONS or the media hype, so we went to see for ourselves what was going on. Unfortunately, we cannot do that when every single plane or coach arrives in the UK—because if we did, he would never see Mrs Reckless and I would never see my wife. The key thing is that there should be a practical way of getting over the problem. It is not rocket science.

Let us consider the options that are available, some of which have been described very eloquently, not only in the speech by the Chairman of the Public Administration Committee but in the Committee’s report. Let me say this about e-Borders. Whenever an immigration Minister has appeared before our Committee—certainly in the seven years since I have been Chairman—we have always asked him about e-Borders. I give the current Minister a free pass: he will be asked about it when he appears before us on 22 July, or possibly before, if the passport crisis is not sorted out very quickly.

Let me outline the issue. Of course the last Government were wrong to have entered into an agreement with a private company just because that company was able to provide such services in other parts of the world. I believe it was a huge mistake, and it would be good to look back and see who was responsible for it. I was a Minister in the last Government, although not the Minister who took the decision to enter into this agreement. However, it is important to look at the process. When the last Government signed the agreement with Raytheon, they did not put benchmarks in that agreement. As a result, Raytheon was able to turn round and say, “Well, we were not told what to do.” That is the subject of an arbitration that has been going on for, I think, four years. It could well be the longest arbitration in history, and every time our Committee asks for information, nobody wants to tell us anything about what is going on.

It is important to learn, although not so that we can blame Ministers in the last Government—as I say, two of them are in the Chamber today: my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) and me. Rather, it is important to learn so that, when we procure services in future and civil servants and Ministers sign off deals worth hundreds of millions of pounds, the Government are clear about what they want and when they want it done, clear that it is being properly monitored, clear that there are penalties if what they want is not being done and clear that the company is clear as well. We are talking about £750 million. This is not chickenfeed. We need to treat taxpayers’ money carefully.

[Mark Reckless]

Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that one of the reasons why many parties to contracts provide for arbitration rather than litigation in the event of a dispute is that arbitration takes place in private, so people do not hear the detail about the case? Is that appropriate in any public contract, let alone one worth £750 million?

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. This is about the public knowing—it is public money that has gone into this—and we need to know precisely what was going on. We also need to know why it has taken four years. The right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) was right to cancel the contract when he did, otherwise it would have drifted on, year after year. At the end of the day, however, we need to know what went wrong so that we do not do it again. For all we know, if we do not know what went wrong, this problem could happen again and again. It is vital that we get to the bottom of the problem of e-Borders.

I welcome this excellent report, which says some valuable things. The Home Affairs Committee continues, of course, to look at immigration and migration issues. As I said at the beginning of my speech, the best way to deal with the issue of migration and immigration is to have accurate statistics that everybody can sign up to. At the moment, we are conducting a debate without knowing the full facts.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hanson]

I anticipated that question and looked at the matter prior to today’s debate. The Library of the House of Commons, which the hon. Gentleman will agree is independent and provides impartial advice, informed me that exit checks were abolished by the Conservative Government in 1994. A Library briefing paper states:

“Paper-based embarkation (‘exit’) controls for passengers departing from the UK were ended in two stages. Checks on persons travelling from sea ports and small airports to the EU (which covered 40 per cent of departing passengers) were abolished in 1994. The remaining checks were abolished in 1998.”

The Labour Government, having been in government for three years, decided in 2000 to reintroduce checks, which is why we began the e-Borders programme.

The e-Borders project still has some issues outstanding, including, as mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East, the dispute with Raytheon. I have tabled parliamentary questions to the Minister, asking him when the dispute might be resolved, what the terms of any final resolution will be and when he intends to bring the matter back to the House, all of which is integral to the objectives suggested by the Public Administration Committee’s report. We need political consensus to ensure that over the next three or four years, whoever the next Government are, a system of exit checks is put in place that meets the objectives desired by every Member who has spoken today.

[Mark Reckless]

Does the shadow Minister share my concern that an implication of contracts providing for arbitration rather than litigation in the event of a dispute is that that arbitration takes place in secret?

[Mr Hanson]

I take two points from major computing contracts. First, there is a lack of public scrutiny and transparency about the methods, the drawing up of contracts and the terms and conditions. It would be helpful if Parliament and the public could have that scrutiny. I would like agreed final contracts to be made public and open to scrutiny and benchmarking and testing by the public. Secondly—this is not meant to be critical of anyone in particular—I was fortunate to be a Minister for 12 years and I often got involved in a major computing contract after it had been agreed by somebody else or at the end of a review and found that Governments are good at policy, but not at delivery. Benchmarking, the methods of control over major contracts and whether or not the expertise is there to implement major contracts are issues that we need to consider in detail.