WE CAN’T TRUST OUR MIGRATION FIGURES
350,000 not counted because inspectors were at wrong airports
HUNDREDS of thousands of Eastern Europe an immigrants c ame i nto Britain uncounted because i nspectors were at t he wrong airports, officials admitted yesterday.
A damning report reveals that 350,000 people arrived unnoticed because of glaring gaps in the survey relied on by the Office for National Statistics for migration estimates.
Those counting migrants into the country only went to Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester during the crucial years of large- scale immigration from Eastern Europe. But during that time, hundreds of thousands arrived through airports such as Luton and Stansted.
In addition, immigrants on many ferry routes were barely or never checked, tens of thousands of children were missed entirely and warning signs from other statistics were ignored, the report adds. The ONS confession comes almost 12 months after the discrepancies first emerged – and follows years of scepticism over the accuracy of its International Pas- senger Survey, which is based on interviews with people passing through air and sea ports.
Last May the Daily Mail revealed that the 2011 census found nearly half a million more people in the country than the ONS had estimated and that the great majority were Eastern European i mmigrants. Yesterday’s report appealed for the millions of pounds spent on the immigration survey to be quadrupled to cope with the rate of arrivals. Other ONS surveys of the population in Britain suggested immigration was much higher than the IPS estimates.
The rate at which National Insurance numbers were issued to new workers also indicated that immigration figures must be wrong. But between 2005 and 2008 nothing was done to put the survey right. The 2011 national census found there were 464,000 more people in the country than had been expected. The ONS said yesterday that most of the unchecked i mmigrants arrived in the four years after Poland and seven other Eastern European countries entered the EU in April 2004, when Britain was one of only three European countries to allow them in to take jobs.
Failures in the survey meant that between 2001 and 2011, net migration – the population change after both immigration and emigration are counted – was underestimated by 346,000, equivalent to a city the size of Bradford. Nearly a quarter of a million went uncounted between 2005 and 2008 alone, when there were just a handful of clipboard survey staff at Luton and Stansted and none at all at Robin Hood airport near Doncaster.
Before the labour market was opened to Eastern Europeans, Tony Blair’s government published projections which said the likely future level of Eastern European i mmigration would be 13,000 people a year.
Inspectors now interview up to 800,000 of the 200million thought to be entering or leaving the country every year. Improving accuracy by a useful margin would mean interviewing four times more passengers, raising the annual cost of the survey from £5million to £20million, the ONS said.
Sir Andrew Green of campaign group MigrationWatch said: ‘This is final confirmation that net foreign migration under Labour totals nearly 4million, two-thirds from outside the European Union.’
The Prime Minister’s spokesman said: ‘What the latest ONS statistics underline is the point at which, in the 2000s, immigration was out of control.’ He said Mr Cameron still had confidence in the ONS.
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