I do share that concern, but if the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will deal with that issue later.
I was talking about the 95% confidence interval in respect of smaller samples relating to individual countries. The ONS will publish estimates of immigrants by country only for the top 15 source countries, because for all the other countries the sample is too small to provide a meaningful estimate—in other words, the number of people from Iran or Afghanistan is actually smaller than the 95% confidence interval itself, so the number is meaningless.
We have vague estimates of the numbers coming in from China, India, Poland, the USA, Australia, Spain, Pakistan, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Nigeria, New Zealand, Lithuania and Hong Kong. Those are the countries for which figures are published. For the other 180 or so countries, no figures are published, so we cannot tell from the data how many Russians, Iranians, South Africans or Romanians are coming to this country.
For the same reason, the ONS migration data cannot provide anything meaningful for local authorities that are trying to work out how migration flows affect their area or to plan for population changes. The UK Statistics Authority also stated:
“The IPS sample size is too small to enable the production of reliable international migration estimates at a local authority level, and cannot realistically be made sufficiently large to achieve robust local estimates.”
The census, which is designed to count every member of the population, provides the only reliable data on the number and characteristics of migrants at local level, but we get it only every 10 years, which is why it was so full of surprises.
In evidence to us, Westminster city council said that the current methodology for estimating migration was not robust enough to support accurate local-level estimates, so that
“the measurement of migration from the perspective of an LA user and as reliable information on our residents is failing”.
The leader of Westminster more or less told us that the only way it can find out the nationalities of the people in the borough is to go around and count them itself. That may be a responsibility that it should take on, but—[Interruption.]