Please excuse me, for I am about to entirely steal a phrase from Conservative MP and former health minister Neil O’Brien: there is a “data desert” when it comes to government and immigration.
Statistics from DWP and HMRC on welfare claims by nationality and the amount of tax paid by nationality (including data on tax credit and child benefit claims), once regularly reported, have been going unpublished – and without real explanation.
This is not exactly a new phenomenon. In fact, it began under Tory government and it was never clear which, if any, ministers signed off on such changes.
But it speaks to a serious, ongoing issue when it comes to understanding immigration in this country: the British state does not even try to calculate the net fiscal costs and benefits of different profiles of migrant.
Some individuals like Nick Timothy, along with O’Brien, have been regularly pushing for this to change over the past few years.
One Tory MP says the data releases need to encompass “everything which measures net benefit” including crime statistics, non-payment of student loans and council house occupation.
Unfortunately, after failed attempts by Robert Jenrick (after he resigned as immigration minister) and O’Brien to amend the last government’s crime and policing bill by collating the visa and asylum status of people convicted in England and Wales, the Tories handed Labour the win of pledging to reveal data on criminality by nationality.
But with immigration policy currently on everyone in Westminster’s minds there is still more to be done and a potential Tory success to be had.
It could be time for the party to finally push for the release of data setting out the true cost of immigration broken down by profile of migrant.
Whatever your views on migration policy, surely it can be agreed that improving the data available would be a good thing?
As one Tory source puts it: “How can you be anti data? How can you be anti transparency? How can you be anti having more informed policy making?”
It is something that is published every year in Denmark through a report from their finance ministry.
It revealed that immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants have had a net negative impact on public finances (in 2018, for example, draining a net 31bn kroner from public finances, some 1.4 per cent of GDP). The finance ministry estimated that immigrants and their descendants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey accounted for 55 per cent of the non-Western migrants and 77 per cent of the costs – the equivalent of about £9,500 per migrant per year.
We too should be able to know if there are sections of immigration representing a fiscal burden to the Treasury, not a gain. It is a policy assessment that is not adequately being made.
Why the Tories in government didn’t get round to a similar sort of publication is slightly beyond me. One Tory source says that “all the political energy went into reforming visa routes and getting the numbers down … until we ran out of political capital” while another accuses there of being an attitude of “computer says no from officials and a lack of will” from politicians. One other option, a different Tory figure suggests, is that “the Treasury didn’t like doing it as it undermined their case that numbers meant rise in GDP”.
An obvious answer also lies in the fact that it falls down the pecking order when there is agreement on policy. The data to make decisions is more important when you have to win an argument.
Right now the argument is open for the win.
We may feel quite a way from the words of the former Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell in 2011, when he said: “At the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration… I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare, not national welfare.”
Yes, the Overton window seems to have shifted and we are now in a position to question assumed Treasury and OBR thinking that mass immigration equates to economic growth.
But the long-term answer to making immigration work for this country could be revealed by data like in Denmark. Making this sort of information available, to aid decision making on immigration cuts, feels inevitable, and it could prove a Tory campaign success story.
Labour are still in denial over the subject and recently Migration and Citizenship minister Seema Malhotra tried to claim “the UK publishes, I believe, more statistics on migration than any other country”, but this is far from the reality.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has promised “a fully transparent approach, publishing all the data” to see the real costs and benefits of different types of migration, and now shadow home secretary Chris Philp tells me: “The public has a right to know the impacts of immigration – both on the economy and on crime. This will enable a more informed debate on the right level of immigration. I therefore support the publication of this kind of data – and if I become Home Secretary would make publishing it an urgent priority.”
The Borders Bill has already made its way through the Commons but Philp is now looking positively at getting shadow ministers in the House of Lords to table an amendment on the issue.
Our levels of immigration change the country we are, not only presenting economic challenges.
David Cameron in 2010 promised to get annual net migration back to the “tens of thousands a year” but numbers reached more than three times the promised level by 2015. Theresa May repeated Cameron’s promise in 2017, but the numbers remained high. Boris Johnson’s manifesto in 2019 then similarly promised that “overall numbers will come down… we will ensure that the British people are always in control”. But in each of the last three years, more than a million people migrated to the UK in the ‘Boriswave’.
The Tories have failed on immigration, it is undeniable. But if they could succeed at finally pushing the release of data that sets out the true costs relating to different types of immigration, it would be better late than never, I suppose.
