The Home Office is doing difficult work in difficult circumstances of coalition. I agree with my hon. Friend. It would seem that spending £1 million or £2 million—or even £5 million or £10 million —to deal with such a vital issue at the heart of a current national debate, which could unsettle an entire nation, is a small sum, if that is what is required to put this matter right.
I suspect that only small sums and adaptations in how we use existing data and how we conduct the passenger surveys would be needed, and that those would assist enormously, in addition to the exit checks.
If we are to plan our public services, we need to have a good idea about what the immigration statistics and data are. It is interesting that the ONS said that the data at the moment
“should not be used as a proxy for flows of foreign migrants into the UK”.
The Oxford Migration Observatory stated:
“sampling errors are too large to measure with a reasonable degree of accuracy the number of migrants to a single region”
within
“the UK, or from a single country of origin”.
Yet if we listen to the public debate, including in my constituency, assumptions are already being made about particular areas and the effect of immigration. I have to admit that sometimes assumptions are presented by Departments, senior politicians and political leaders on
the level of Romanian and Bulgarian immigration, for example, although the data just are not there to justify the statements.
My hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) made it clear on “Newsnight” a few weeks ago that, when looking at current data collection, a handful of Romanians or Bulgarians—four, five or six—making a certain statement could lead to a difference of 4,000 in our estimate of the number of Romanians or Bulgarians coming into the country. It is clear that the data are currently insufficient to draw conclusions or create policies from.
The current data are vague and self-selecting. People who go to another country wanting to stay there, knowing that there were no exit checks and that they could probably get away with it—not that I would do this—would, if they were desperate, answer appropriately to a question in a passenger survey about how long they intended to stay, to ensure that it looked okay. There is a lot of self-selection in who answers the survey and there will clearly be, if we are all reasonable human beings, an understanding that people will answer questions to serve their purpose, although I would hope that everyone is honest.
Although we want to get immigration levels down to tens of thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands, with the data and statistics that have been available for the past four years our current estimates could be 200,000 or 250,000, one way or the other: these numbers are enormous and the statistical significance of the data really needs to be examined and reined in as soon as possible.