Thread by @BenChu_

Did a million migrants leave the UK during the pandemic? Or was it many fewer?

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A thread…🧵

You’ve probably read the widely reported estimate from @jdportes and @StrongerInNos for @ESCoEorg in January that as many as 1.3 million people might have left the UK last year ...2/

escoe.ac.uk/estimating-the…

But we’ve had some other estimates from serious analysts.

One from @resfoundation suggests it's closer to 500,000... resolutionfoundation.org/app/uploads/20…

Another from @LSEnews puts it at low as 235,000...3/ blogsmedia.lse.ac.uk/blogs.dir/123/…

That’s a big range, to put it mildly!

So what should we make of it? What’s really happening?

The answer is that it’s simply very hard to be sure.

Here’s why...4/

We generally get migration estimates from the ONS’ International Passenger Survey.

But that’s had serious reliability issues for a while now for various reasons.

Moreover it’s been suspended since the pandemic began for safety reasons...5/
content.govdelivery.com/accounts/UKONS…

So estimates have been scraped, instead, from the ONS’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) – a really big national survey of 40,000 households.

And LFS data has pointed to a massive drop in the non-UK born population since 2019 - around 894,000 (around 10%)....6/ ons.gov.uk/surveys/inform…

Because the ONS didn’t change their estimate of the overall UK population they had to pencil in a huge increase in their estimate of the *UK-born* population to make the numbers add up.

But @jdportes and @StrongerInNos argue, reasonably, that this simply isn’t plausible...7/

So they tried holding the UK-born population constant instead – a much more plausible scenario – and this gave the result of an even bigger drop in the non-UK born population of 1.3 million.

Hence the headlines about more than a million migrants leaving...8/

So there has been an exodus on that scale?

Not so fast, because the way the LFS has been collected has changed during the pandemic for safety reasons.

It used to be done face-to-face with householders, now it’s done researchers by phone...9/

The response rate has gone right down, from 40% before the pandemic to just 26% at the end of last year…10/

And the share of renters in the households being surveyed has also declined, down from 32% before the pandemic to 21%…11/

The @MigObs suspects, for various reasons, that those changes mean the number of migrants being reached might have fallen relative to previously and therefore have artificially skewed the LFS estimates of the size of non-UK population downwards...12/

migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/upl…

The ONS also today released some analysis of HMRC payroll data which suggests a much smaller fall in the number of non-UK employees than implied by the LFS’s estimates...13/ ons.gov.uk/employmentandl…

So has the exodus been relatively small?

Again, not so fast, because payroll data only covers *employees* and many non-UK workers are in the informal/self-employed sector.

And it’s not *proven* that the LFS *has* artificially depressed the size of the non-UK population...14/

The bottom line?

There has almost certainly been some emigration of the non-UK born population.

But, unfortunately, we really can’t say with any confidence - at least as of yet - whether it’s a drop of a quarter of a million or a million and a quarter!...15/

More here for @indypremium 👇

ENDS

independent.co.uk/independentpre…