Suella Braverman is leading the cabinet fight to keep the government on track to curb net migration. Photo: HENRY NICOLLS
Swella Braverman I've had many difficult days as Home Secretary, including this week. Thursday is expected to be another one when it hits figures expected to see net migration reach an all-time high.
Predictions are given of 700,000 or even a million additional people living in the UK in 2022. , which dwarfs the most recent figure of 504,000, which is a record in itself.
There have even been speculations that Mrs. Braverman might resign over this issue because she is not prepared to take responsibility for the Government, which she believes should do much more to reduce the number of cases.
However, in The startling numbers will be more than meets the eye, and Rishi Sunak will probably seize on them as proof that record migration is not a problem he created himself.
The Office for National Statistics, the body responsible for collecting data on migration, has completely changed its method of counting people in and out of the country, and the Tories will argue that this is largely the reason migration seems to have dried up. control.
1205 UK total net migration
To be clear, the government is not saying the numbers are wrong or that they should be lower. Instead, he will argue that the ONS has underestimated the number of migrants who have settled in the UK for many years.
Bad news
The fact that net migration has long been higher than official statistics show is not exactly good news for conservatives, but this is at least a mitigating factor for the government, which, at first glance, manages a sharply rising curve.
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the ONS used a method called the International Passenger Survey (IPS) to estimate net migration, which, in the ONS's own words, «has gone beyond its original purpose.» In truth, it was not so much stretched as broken beyond repair.
IPS relied on a sample of passengers arriving at major ports and airports, including Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester, on their reasons for entering the UK. Most were tourists, and those who were migrants were asked how long they intended to stay. Their responses were then extrapolated to give an estimate of long-term immigration, and this formed the ONS data.
Immigration from the EU to the UK
Its shortcomings, if not already apparent, were exposed when the ONS concluded from the census . evidence that he completely missed the arrival of nearly half a million Eastern European migrants because they used cheap Wizz Air flights that landed at airports including Leeds and Luton that were not covered by the IPS survey.
National Insurance data also showed huge gaps in official data. In some periods, EU citizens were issued three times as many NI numbers as the estimated number of EU citizens arriving in the country, suggesting that hundreds of thousands of arrivals were missed each year.
This anomaly was exacerbated by the fact that more than six million EU citizens applied for permanent status in the UK after Brexit, despite the fact that the ONS believed that only 3.5 million people lived here.
Rethinking the pandemic
The pandemic has given the ONS a chance to put its house in order while arrivals have been dwindling, and the latest numbers are the result of that rethinking. They use hard data from the Department of Labor and Pensions and the Department of the Interior rather than estimates based on polls, which means Thursday's numbers will be much more accurate than ever before and almost certainly much higher than they could use. IPS.
Notably, the ONS has begun recalculating historical migration data using its new method and will release 2018 data along with core data for the year ending December 2022. allies of Mr. Sunak to defend his track record by pointing out that the problem arose long before he was in office.
Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory, said: «The new method is still under development, but once we get to the point where the methodology is approved, there will undoubtedly be more people covered by the statistics.»
She said other factors mean the numbers will be high in 2022 before they drop in subsequent years. Refugees from Ukraine who will be included in the 2022 data have already gone home or are about to return home, which means they will be counted in the 2023 emigration data.
Number of UK citizens (overseas) arrivals from Hong Kong have also peaked, meaning they will be contributing to growth in 2022, but not in the net figure of 2023, and the recent surge in the number of international students inflates the numbers because they have not yet started en masse return home.
Ms Sumption said: “Foreign students typically stay for one to three years, which means that if you get a big influx, you can expect a significant increase in emigration after one to three of the year. I expect this to happen before 2024-2025, but not in 2022 numbers.”
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