About Migration Watchdog

An independent, data-driven monitor of illegal and irregular immigration to the United Kingdom, and of the state's handling of it.

Every figure here carries the publication it came from, the period it covers and the date it was retrieved. 43 official sources, 54 downloadable datasets, and a public log of 20 corrections this site has made to its own output.

What this site is

A measurement site. It tracks the scale of illegal and irregular entry to the UK, what the asylum system costs the taxpayer, foreign national offending and the enforcement record, integration evidence, and the local footprint of asylum accommodation — using official statistics, official inquiry findings and audited public spending reports, each linked at the point of use. It is unapologetically critical of the failure to control the border, because that is what the numbers, plainly read, describe: a decade of rising irregular arrivals, a support system whose accommodation contracts are now estimated at several times their original cost, and an enforcement effort whose own published returns run far below the arrivals it records.

Being critical of the record is not the same as being loose with it. The strongest thing this site can do to the argument it is making is to be impossible to catch out — so the constraints below are not decoration, and several of them have cost it findings it would have liked to publish.

What is here

34 sections, of which these are the ones to start with:

Arrivals: Small-boat crossings weekly, every detected illegal entry route quarterly, and total net migration shown separately so the two are never confused.
Asylum: Claims, the backlog and its peak, decisions and grant rates, and the route people entered by before claiming.
Hotels: Every official figure that exists on contingency hotel accommodation — and a plain statement of the ones that do not exist.
Appeals: Tribunal receipts, outcomes and the open caseload, with the cohort analysis showing where initial decisions end up after appeal.
Crime & Justice: Foreign national offenders in prison and in the community, returns and deportations, detention and its welfare record, and organised immigration crime.
Costs: Audited costs, the department's own unit cost per asylum conclusion, the £25,000 spending disclosures, and what the accommodation providers file.
Local: Supported asylum seekers, hotels, homelessness after asylum support and school first language for 346 local authorities and 12 regions.
Nationalities: Arrivals, claims and outcomes by nationality — with the prison figures kept deliberately apart from them.
Integration: Language, employment and Prevent, with the inquiry findings quoted rather than characterised.
Ministers' claims: What ministers claim in Parliament, quoted verbatim, printed beside this site's own figure on the same subject.
Questions: The 200 most recently answered written questions on these subjects, with how long they took to answer.
Petitions: Public petitions on immigration and asylum, their signatures and any government response.
Legislation: Immigration bills before Parliament and the recorded Commons votes on them.
Downloads: All 54 cleaned series as CSV and JSON, each with a provenance header.

The rules this site works to

No invented numbers. Every figure carries its source, period and retrieval date, and the build genuinely fails if one does not. Unverifiable figures are dropped or visibly badged as unverified — and the badge travels into the downloadable file, so it cannot be lost by exporting it.
A rate only where the source publishes both halves. A rate appears when the numerator and denominator are both officially published, both cited on the page, and measure the same population over the same area. Where no official denominator exists — as for offending by nationality — no rate is published and the absence is stated instead.
Verbatim or dropped. Quotes are reproduced as published, never tightened. Where a whole sentence is quoted from a longer document, it is checked character-for-character against the source before it ships, and the link goes to that source in context.
An assertion is never a finding. A parliamentary question, a petition, a bill and a ministerial statement are all claims by the people making them. They appear here as what somebody said, never as evidence that it is true.
Legal and illegal migration are always distinguished, and ideologies are distinguished from individuals. Inquiry findings on sensitive subjects are quoted verbatim with page references, and never paraphrased beyond the text.
Criticism is aimed at policy and institutions. The failure documented here is a failure of the state — not of any individual seeking a better life, and not of the lawful migrants who are the large majority of migration to the UK.

The boundary is set out in full on what this site does not say, and the methodology for every pipeline is on sources and methodology.

When this site is wrong

It publishes the error. There are 20 entries in the corrections log, the most recent dated 2026-09-02 — each naming what was wrong, what it should have said, and what changed. They are found by auditing this site's own output, not reported by anyone, and several of them are findings published against arguments the site had already made.

What changed and when is on the changelog, last updated 2026-09-02. Both have RSS feeds, so a reader can watch this site correct itself without visiting it.

How to check it

Every figure links to the publication it came from. Follow one — that is the whole point of them being there.
Download the cleaned data. Each file carries a header naming the source, the period, the retrieval date and the licence, so it can be checked against the publisher without coming back here.
Every headline figure in one place, generated from the same accessors the pages use — so this site cannot show a different number in two places.
Machine-readable summaries at /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt, kept in step with the pages by the same build.

What this site is not

Not anti-migrant, for the reason given above.
Not about legal migration, except where context requires the distinction — which this site always draws.
Not a campaign. It is not affiliated with any political party, campaign group or movement, and it endorses nothing and nobody.
Not a news site. It publishes numbers with sources, on the cadence the underlying statistics are published.
Not a leak outlet. It publishes what is already public and nothing that is not — no hotel addresses, no personal details, no unpublished lists.

Non-affiliation

Migration Watchdog is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Migration Watch UK (migrationwatchuk.org) or any similarly named organisation.

Independence and funding

Self-funded by its operator. No advertising, no donations, no political funding, no paid content. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page first.

Contact

Corrections and enquiries: corrections@migrationwatchdog.com. If a figure misquotes its source, say so and it will be fixed with a dated note. Errors in the underlying official statistics should go to their publisher; published revisions are reflected at the next refresh.