Data, sources and methodology
Every source this site uses, its cadence, licence and last-checked date — plus full methodology, the anti-fabrication rule, and the corrections policy.
The rule this site is built on
Every statistic on this site carries four things: the exact publication it came from, a link to it, the period it covers, and the date we retrieved it. Figures are parsed directly from official spreadsheets and APIs by scripts whose output is version-controlled — the history of every number is auditable. Where a figure can only be curated by hand (costs, inquiry findings, polling), it is stored with the verbatim sentence it came from. A figure that cannot be verified is either dropped or visibly badged as unverified — the build fails otherwise. We never invent, estimate or extrapolate numbers.
Source register
Small boat activity in the English Channel: Provisional operational data (daily arrivals since 2018; weekly French prevention estimates). The quarterly Illegal entry routes statistics are the authoritative series.
Immigration system statistics data tables (year ending March 2026): Asylum claims, backlog, support (incl. hotels and by local authority), returns, FNO returns, and the Illegal entry routes tables. Attachment vintages vary — each figure on this site carries the period parsed from its own table.
Offender management statistics quarterly (prison population by nationality): England and Wales. Prison nationality is not immigration status.
Safe and legal (humanitarian) routes + Resettlement by local authority (Immigration system statistics): Hum_01 route totals include in-country grants (mostly Ukraine-scheme extensions) — the out-of-country split is shown where arrival numbers are meant.
Immigration detention + Organised immigration crime summary tables (Immigration system statistics): Det_01 (entering/leaving/in detention) and OIC_01 (disruptions by threat level; recent quarters provisional).
Tribunal statistics quarterly — First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber): The live asylum-appeals series (receipts, outcomes, open caseload). The Home Office's own appeals table froze at year ending March 2023. FTT counting bases differ from Home Office decision statistics.
Home Office spending over £25,000: Transaction-level disclosures (individual payments of £25,000 or more only). Payments naming the asylum accommodation providers appear only intermittently — large sums in some months, none at all in long runs of others — so the series cannot be read as what providers are paid; the site presents the disclosed sums and that irregularity, nothing more.
Companies House register — AASC provider filings: Registry facts and filing links for the three asylum accommodation contract holders (Clearsprings Ready Homes 07921508, Serco 00242246, Mears Group 03232863). Links only — no accounts parsing.
Mid-year population estimates, local authority based (via Nomis NM_31_1): The per-10,000 denominator on local-authority and region pages, all four nations, current boundaries. Northern Ireland lags one year behind Great Britain.
Written questions and answers (Written Questions API): Recent answered written questions on asylum/enforcement topics. Framing rule: a question is an assertion by a member, not a finding — the linked official record carries the government's answer.
First-time asylum applicants, annual (migr_asyappctza): EU context panel only. The UK is outside Eurostat's collection; UK claim counts use a different counting basis and are shown for scale, never compared as a league table.
Returns from the UK and illegal working activity since July 2024: HTML-table transparency releases: illegal-working visits and arrests by English region and sector, half-yearly enforcement series since 2019, monthly operational returns since December 2022. Enforcement activity is not convictions; operational counts differ from the quarterly official statistics and are never mixed with them.
The Border Security Commander's annual report: data: The only official UK-France agreement transfer series (monthly IN/OUT) and arrests for organised immigration crime by law-enforcement agency. Transfer counts are never compared against total arrivals as a rate.
Migration transparency data — Immigration Enforcement (FNOs living in the community): Table FNO_08a: foreign national offenders subject to deportation action living in the community (criteria and non-criteria basis from 2022 Q4). The Immigration and protection workbook additionally supplies the department's own asylum cost ledger (ASY_04) and 6-month decision rate (ASY_01).
Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent Programme: Referrals are concerns raised, not offences. Ideology categories are the Home Office's own.
Census 2021 tables TS004 (country of birth) and TS029 (English proficiency): England and Wales only; census day 21 March 2021 — predates subsequent arrival waves.
NAO: Investigation into asylum accommodation: FY 2023-24 asylum support and hotel spending.
NAO: The Home Office's asylum accommodation contracts: AASC 10-year cost: £4.5bn original estimate vs £15.3bn current. Quotes reflect the NAO's published correction.
NAO: An analysis of the asylum system (HC 1517): FY 2024-25 asylum spending estimates.
National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (Baroness Casey): Quoted verbatim with page references only.
IICSA: Child sexual exploitation by organised networks — investigation report: Quoted verbatim only (Part B.5, ethnicity data collection).
More in Common — published polling tables: Poll entries cite fieldwork dates, sample size and exact wording from the published weighted tables.
ONS A12: Employment, unemployment and economic inactivity by nationality and country of birth: Labour Force Survey estimates, not seasonally adjusted. ONS rate-limits automated access intermittently; on a failed refresh the previous quarter's figures are retained and dated, never approximated.
ICIBI inspection reports (asylum casework; contact with migrants without leave): The statutory inspectorate's findings, quoted verbatim with paragraph references.
Home Office annual report and accounts 2025-26: The department's audited accounts — losses and special payments disclosures quoted verbatim (p.223).
Long-term international immigration, emigration and net migration flows, provisional: TOTAL long-term net migration — overwhelmingly lawful routes — carried as an explicitly-labelled context panel only, never mixed with irregular-migration figures. Parsed from the release spreadsheet, not the bulletin prose: the bulletin's '(updated to 331,000)' refers to the revised year-ending December 2024 estimate, not the latest year.
Statutory homelessness in England — detailed local authority tables: Households owed a prevention (A2P) or relief (A2R) homelessness duty where the reason for loss of last settled home was being required to leave Home Office asylum accommodation. Prevention and relief are different duties and are never summed here. Households, not people; England and regional figures are rounded to the nearest 10 while local-authority figures are unrounded; prior quarters are revised between releases.
School pupils and their characteristics — pupils by first language: Pupils in state-funded schools whose first language is known or believed to be other than English, by local authority. First language is not immigration status and this is not a count of migrant children. Published at upper-tier authority level, so no figure exists for district authorities and none is substituted.
Legal aid statistics — main data file: Legal aid for immigration and asylum, using the publisher's own case-category labels (the law-of-case label is in sub_cat2). Applications, grants and Exceptional Case Funding rows carry volume but no spend. The most recent year's Civil Representation closures are depressed by claim-submission lag, so no year-on-year change is drawn for that scheme.
Inspection reports on immigration detention: Independent inspections of immigration removal centres. Report titles, dates and links are refreshed automatically; findings are quoted only after being checked against the report itself, and every quoted concern is published alongside the inspection's own overall judgement.
Office for Statistics Regulation: correspondence on Home Office statistics: The statistics regulator's own letters to and from the Home Office. These are not statistics: they are the regulator's assessment of how the department's figures are produced and released. Where a letter says a published figure was mis-stated, that is a correction input for this site, not a new number.
Hansard: ministerial statements on immigration and asylum: The Official Report. A statement made in Parliament is a claim by the speaker, not a statistic. Statements are published verbatim beside the official figure on the same subject; this site does not adjudicate between them.
Independent Monitoring Board reports on immigration detention: Statutory monitoring boards report annually on every immigration removal centre and short-term holding facility, and the Home Office publishes a written response to each. Titles, dates and links are refreshed automatically; nothing is quoted from a report that has not been read.
Companies House filing history: asylum accommodation providers: Filing records only, for the three AASC accommodation providers. No turnover figure is published here: Companies House serves these accounts as scanned PDFs with no extractable text and no iXBRL, so a revenue number could only be produced by reading a financial table off an image — which this site will not do. Company revenue would in any case not be the same thing as what the Home Office paid.
Petitions to the UK Parliament and Government: Signature counts for public petitions on immigration and asylum, with the government's response and any debate where one has happened. A petition is an assertion by its creator and its signatories, never a finding of fact and never evidence that its premise is true. Signature counts by region come from the petition's own published breakdown; the regional figures sum to less than the total because signatures recorded outside the UK regions are excluded from them.
Bills before Parliament: Immigration and asylum bills with their current stage. A bill's stage is a fact about parliamentary process, not about the law: nothing in a bill is in force until it is enacted and commenced, and this site says so on the page rather than reporting proposals as though they were rules.
Commons divisions on immigration legislation: Recorded votes, with the official aye and no counts and the member-level lists behind them. The published counts are what this site reports; party splits are derived from the member lists and labelled as such, because the official count and the list length can differ by one where tellers are recorded separately.
Home Office costs associated with the MEDP with Rwanda and the Illegal Migration Act 2023: The department's own final account of what the Rwanda partnership cost and what it delivered. It is deliberately treated as a static record rather than a live series: the partnership ended in July 2024. The spend table is asserted at build time to reconcile in both directions, because a hand-transcribed table is exactly where a digit goes missing.
Prevention of Future Deaths reports: Coroners' reports made under Schedule 5 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, filtered to those where the Home Office is a NAMED RECIPIENT and the report concerns the immigration system. This site publishes the fact of the report, its recipients and a link — never the deceased's name, the circumstances of the death or the inquest conclusion.
Fatal incident investigations in immigration detention: Independent investigations into deaths of people detained under immigration powers, listed by the establishment the Ombudsman's own taxonomy assigns. Centres with no published investigation are listed too, because an absence is a fact rather than a gap. No name, cause of death or personal circumstance is published here.
Select committee reports on asylum and immigration: Committee reports with the response deadline the parliamentary record gives and whether a government response is recorded against each. An empty response list means none is RECORDED, which is not the same claim as none existing — a response can be published late or take the form of a letter, and this site says only what the record shows.
Asylum support: what you'll get: Guidance, not a statistical release. The weekly support rates are set by statutory instrument and change without a publication schedule or a revision notice, so each figure is quoted verbatim with the date it was read rather than tracked against a cadence window.
Claim asylum in the UK: Used for one thing only: the department's own sentence on whether a person may work while a claim is outstanding, quoted in full. No figure is taken from this page.
How each pipeline works
One entry per wired source: the artefact the figure is read from, the step that is easy to get wrong, and what this site deliberately refuses to do with it. If a source in the register above has no entry here, it is listed at the end of this section rather than left unmentioned.
Arrivals and migration flows
Small boats, weekly
The Home Office publishes a time-series spreadsheet of daily small-boat arrivals since January 2018, updated weekly. The file URL is date-stamped and changes with every release, so the refresh re-resolves it through the GOV.UK Content API each run rather than remembering a link; the landing page also offers an HTML preview of the same table, and the parser takes the spreadsheet specifically. From the daily table it computes annual totals, the year-to-date figure and the cumulative-by-day comparison. These are provisional operational data and they are revised.
Illegal entry routes, quarterly
The authoritative arrivals series. Detected arrivals by method of entry, nationality, age and sex come from the quarterly Illegal entry routes tables, along with the linkage between arrival and a later asylum claim or National Referral Mechanism referral. Where the weekly operational series and this one disagree for the same year, both figures are shown side by side further down this page rather than one being quietly preferred.
Total net migration (ONS)
Long-term international migration is parsed from the ONS spreadsheet, not from the bulletin text. That is deliberate: the bulletin's prose attaches revised figures to the year they revise, so reading it produces the wrong year's number. The dataset page lists previous editions alongside the current one, so the parser ranks the asset URLs by the edition each carries in its own path and takes the newest. The figure is context and is labelled as such everywhere it appears — it is overwhelmingly lawful migration and must never be compared with, or added to, arrivals or asylum figures.
Safe and legal routes
Resettlement and humanitarian route grants, from the quarterly tables, shown so the lawful routes are visible at the same scale as the irregular ones. Scheme names change and schemes close; the parser reads the published scheme labels rather than a fixed list of its own.
EU context (Eurostat)
First-time asylum applicants across EU member states, used only as indicative context. The UK is outside Eurostat's collection and its claim counts are on a different basis, so no UK-versus-EU ratio is constructed and the caveat renders with the panel.
The asylum system
Quarterly Home Office tables
Asylum claims, the backlog, decisions and grant rates, support and accommodation, returns and foreign national offender returns are parsed from the summary and detailed tables of the quarterly Immigration System Statistics. Tables on that page carry different vintages, so each figure's period is parsed from its own table title and never inferred from the release date. Columns are selected by matching the header text, not by position — a publisher inserting a column would otherwise silently shift every figure beneath it.
Accommodation by local authority
The detailed support table (people in receipt of Section 95, Section 4 and Section 98 support, split by accommodation type, per local authority) is the only official geography that exists for asylum accommodation. Counts are point-in-time snapshots by registered address, and contingency sites open and close between quarters. The build checks that the local-authority hotel and total columns sum to the national figures published in the same release.
Appeals (MoJ tribunals)
First-tier Tribunal receipts, outcomes and open caseload come from the quarterly tribunal statistics. The tribunal counts CASES and the Home Office counts PEOPLE, and the tribunal's headline caseload spans all immigration case types rather than asylum alone — so the page compares asylum against asylum, states both units, and publishes no ratio between the two bodies' figures. Which row is the asylum row is decided by the parser and published with the data, so no consumer has to pattern-match a label.
Legal aid
Completed Legal Help matters and their cost come from the Legal Aid Agency's main data file — a 37MB CSV that is streamed rather than loaded, and decoded as latin-1 because it contains a pound sign that is not valid UTF-8. The law-of-case label lives in a sub-category column, not the one called 'category'. The trap here is permanent and encoded as a test: 'Immigration-Non-asylum' ends with the word 'asylum', so matching by suffix folds the two categories together and inflates asylum by exactly the non-asylum total. Labels are matched exactly and the two sets are asserted to be disjoint.
Migration transparency workbook
The Home Office's own unit cost per asylum conclusion, total asylum costs, caseworking staff and the share of claims decided within six months come from the immigration and protection transparency workbook. These are the department's own management figures, published on a different basis from the official statistics, and they are labelled as such.
Enforcement, returns and detention
Returns and foreign national offenders
Enforced returns, voluntary returns, port refusals and FNO returns come from the returns summary tables, with the offence-group and nationality breakdowns from the detailed tables. Residual rows — 'Other', 'Unknown', 'Not recorded' — are excluded from charts of offence groups by rule rather than by luck, and the build fails on any published Total row that reaches a chart as though it were a category.
Detention and its welfare record
People entering detention, people held at the snapshot, reasons for leaving detention, Rule 35 medical reports, use-of-force incidents on removal flights and pregnant women detained all come from the detention summary and detailed tables. Rule 35 counts are reports made, not concerns upheld.
Enforcement activity (HTML transparency tables)
Illegal-working visits and arrests by region, the half-yearly series, and the monthly operational returns counts come from transparency publications made of HTML tables rather than spreadsheets, so the parser reads the tables directly from the attachment. Two things are load-bearing: enforcement activity is visits and arrests, which are not convictions and are never labelled as such; and the monthly operational returns are on a different counting basis from the quarterly official statistics, so the two are never summed or plotted together.
UK–France transfers and organised immigration crime
Transfers under the UK–France agreement (in and out, monthly) and arrests for organised immigration crime by law-enforcement agency come from the Border Security Commander's published data. The monthly rows are asserted to sum to the publisher's own totals. No 'success rate' is constructed against arrivals: the numerator and denominator come from different collections and measure different things.
Prisons
The foreign-national prison population and its nationality breakdown come from the Ministry of Justice's quarterly prison population tables for England and Wales. The share of the prison population is computed from that same table's own total, so numerator and denominator come from one source. Prison nationality is not immigration status, and the page says so before it says anything else.
Independent scrutiny of detention
Inspection reports from HM Inspectorate of Prisons and annual reports from the statutory Independent Monitoring Boards — plus the Home Office's published written response to each board report — are listed with their dates and links. Titles and dates refresh automatically; nothing is quoted from a report that has not been read, and where an inspection is quoted, its overall judgement is published alongside the concerns it raised so that neither can be mined without the other.
Places and local impact
Population denominators and the per-10,000 rate
Rates per 10,000 residents use ONS mid-year population estimates, which cover all four nations, rather than Census 2021 residents. A rate is only constructed where the numerator and denominator are both officially published, both cited on the page, and measure the same population over the same area. That is why an accommodation rate per 10,000 residents qualifies and a per-population offending rate by nationality does not: no official denominator for the nationality population of England and Wales exists.
Census 2021 context
Country of birth and English-language proficiency come from Census 2021 tables for England and Wales via Nomis. Scotland and Northern Ireland ran separate censuses, so this context is England and Wales only and reflects March 2021 — five years before most of the other figures on the site.
Homelessness after asylum support
Households owed a prevention or relief duty after being required to leave Home Office asylum accommodation come from MHCLG's detailed local-authority tables. The two duties are never added together — a household moves between them — and these are households, not people. England and regional figures are rounded to the nearest ten in the source while local-authority figures are not, so totals do not always reconcile exactly.
Pupils whose first language is not English
From the Department for Education's bulk statistics file. The figures are published at upper-tier authority level, so district pages say that rather than borrowing a county figure, and the 'Total' rows cover state-funded schools only. The department publishes some superseded area codes, so a small map of legacy codes to current ones is maintained with an assertion that fails when the map stops being needed.
Employment by country of birth
Employment, unemployment and inactivity rates for UK-born and non-UK-born residents come from ONS table A12, which is a Labour Force Survey estimate rather than a count: small samples move the rates around, and country of birth is not nationality — many non-UK-born residents are British citizens. The workbook is a legacy binary format whose extraction needs a local step, so if a refresh cannot reach it the previous quarter's figures are retained and dated rather than approximated.
Prevent referrals
Referrals to Prevent and the concern type recorded for each come from the Home Office's annual statistics. A referral is a referral: it is not a finding that anyone was radicalised, and the page states that a concern type is the assessment recorded by the referring body. The release publishes the current tables alongside a historical set under a nearly identical title, so the parser distinguishes them explicitly.
Money
Curated cost citations
There is no machine-readable government dataset for asylum costs. Every cost figure is curated by hand with the verbatim sentence it came from, and the build rejects a curated figure that has no quote. A figure that cannot be verified is either dropped or rendered with a visible 'unverified' badge — and the badge travels with the figure into the CSV download, so it cannot be lost by exporting it.
The £25,000 spending disclosures
The Home Office publishes every individual transaction of £25,000 or more. This site totals them per month for the three asylum accommodation contract holders. The finding is the pattern rather than the total: in most months the disclosures contain no transaction at all naming Clearsprings or Mears, while the accommodation contracts run continuously — so the series cannot be read as what the providers are paid, and every sentence about it is computed at render time rather than written down once.
Provider accounts
Filing records for the three accommodation providers come from Companies House. No turnover figure appears with them, and the page says why: all three file full accounts, which disclose turnover, but Companies House serves those particular filings as scanned PDFs with no extractable text and no iXBRL data. Producing a revenue figure would mean reading a financial table off an image with nothing to check it against. Company revenue would not be the same thing as what the Home Office paid in any case.
Parliament and regulation
Written parliamentary questions
Answered written questions matching asylum and enforcement topics come from the UK Parliament API. Its search matches ANSWER text as well as question text, so questions about unrelated subjects come back whenever an answer happens to mention a search term; relevance is enforced on the question itself. The aggregates on that page — median days to answer, department, party, most-tabled headings — are computed over exactly the questions published and nothing wider, which the page states, because a topic-matched set is not a measure of any department's overall performance.
Petitions, bills and divisions
Petition signature counts, immigration bills with their current stage, and recorded Commons divisions come from three separate parliamentary APIs. A petition is an assertion by its signatories; a bill's stage is a fact about process and not about the law; a division's official aye and no counts are what this site reports, with party splits derived from the published member lists and labelled as derived, because the official count and the list length can differ where tellers are recorded separately.
Ministerial claims (Hansard)
Quantified claims made by ministers are quoted verbatim from the Official Report — the whole sentence in which the claim is made, never a fragment and never a truncation, and each is checked character-for-character against the full contribution before it is published. A claim is kept only when it is about a subject this site holds an official figure for, and only when it carries a real quantity: a sentence about the Crown Court backlog is not about the asylum backlog, and the digit in 'G7' is not a number of anything. The site prints the claim beside its own figure with both periods and does not adjudicate between them.
The statistics regulator
Correspondence between the Office for Statistics Regulation and the Home Office is republished so a reader can see what the independent regulator has said about how these figures are produced and released. It is commentary on provenance, not a statistic, and it is reported as the regulator's judgement rather than as this site's finding. Where the regulator says a published figure was mis-stated, that is an input to this site's own corrections log.
Registered sources with no methodology entry yet
Home Office costs associated with the MEDP with Rwanda and the Illegal Migration Act 2023; Prevention of Future Deaths reports; Fatal incident investigations in immigration detention; Select committee reports on asylum and immigration; Asylum support: what you'll get; Claim asylum in the UK. These are curated citations rather than parsed pipelines — each figure taken from one of them carries its own verbatim quote and a link to the document it came from.
Reading the figures
Periods. Home Office statistics mostly use years ending March; calendar-year series are labelled as such; financial-year cost figures are labelled FY. We render figures exactly as published and do not re-round.
Constructed rates. A rate appears only where 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, no rate is published — the absence is stated instead.
Curated figures. There is no machine-readable government dataset for asylum costs, inquiry findings or polling. Those entries are curated by hand with the verbatim sentence from the source document, and the build rejects any curated figure without its quote.
Provisional vs authoritative, measured
The weekly operational series and the quarterly official statistics are different pipelines, and they disagree slightly after revisions. Rather than hide that, here is the divergence for every year where the two published totals differ:
| Year | Weekly series | Official (IER) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 8,462 | 8,466 | -4 |
| 2022 | 45,755 | 45,774 | -19 |
Both series are published by the Home Office; the official Illegal entry routes tables are authoritative. Pages use the weekly series only for the current year and label it provisional.
What the regulator says about these statistics
The Office for Statistics Regulation is the independent regulator of UK official statistics. Where it has written to the Home Office about the immigration and asylum figures this site republishes, that correspondence is listed here — because a reader judging a number should be able to see what its own regulator has said about how it is produced and released. The openings below are the regulator's published words; each links to the full letter. This is commentary on provenance, not a statistic, and it is reported as the regulator's judgement, never as this site's.
Ed Humpherson to John Wilkins: Asylum Seeker Hotel Population Statistics
8 May 2026
“Dear John, Thank you for your letter informing me of the unscheduled release of an internal Home Office figure that appears similar to an upcoming official statistic from the Asylum Seeker Hotel Population Statistics series. I agree with your view that this is a breach of the Code of Practice for Statistics. I note your reasons for deciding not to produce an ad-hoc release for the figure in line with published guidance on the use…”
John Wilkins to Ed Humpherson: Asylum Seeker Hotel Population Statistics
30 April 2026
“Dear Ed, I am writing to inform you that I have become aware of the unscheduled release of an internal Home Office figure that appears similar to an upcoming official statistic from our Asylum Seeker Hotel Population Statistics series. Despite not being released publicly through formal channels, a figure for the number of asylum seekers…”
Response from Sir Robert Chote to Alistair Carmichael MP – Asylum backlog figures
18 January 2024
“On 18th January 2024 our Chair, Sir Robert Chote, wrote to Alistair Carmichael, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Home Affairs in response to his letter regarding the backlog of asylum claims. We highlighted the need for ministers and advisers to think carefully about how a reasonable person would interpret a quantitative claim of clearing the backlog…”
Ed Humpherson to Rob England: Withdrawn Asylum Applications
14 December 2023
“Dear Mr England Withdrawn Asylum Applications Thank you for contacting us. We have looked into your concern. The Home Office has confirmed that the total number of withdrawn asylum cases is correct but recognises that there may be an error where withdrawn asylum applications may not have been correctly classified into the two potential sub-classifications…”
Ed Humpherson to Will Moy: Home Office Transparency
5 May 2023
“Dear Will Home Office’s recent use of statistics and data Thank you for your detailed letter of 27 March about the Home Office’s recent use of statistics and data. We share your disappointment that claims continue to be made by Ministers that cannot be verified from the Home Office’s published statistics. We have been engaging…”
Will Moy to Ed Humpherson: Home Office Transparency
27 March 2023
“Dear Ed Humpherson, I write to raise concerns about the Home Office’s recent use of statistics and data, and to ask for your potential engagement around it. There appears to be a concerning trend at the Home Office of claims being made based on operational data which is not published. There also appears to be…”
Ed Humpherson to Maya Esslemont and Anna Powell-Smith: Modern slavery data
8 December 2022
“Ed Humpherson responds to Maya Esslemont and Anna Powell-Smith of After Exploitation and the Centre for Public Data regarding their concerns with Home Office statistics on modern slavery and the National Referral Mechanism.”
Ed Humpherson to Jennifer Rubin: use of National Referral Mechanism statistics
8 December 2022
“Ed Humpherson writes to Jennifer Rubin regarding concerns raised with OSR by users of the Home Office’s National Referral Mechanism statistics about claims that people are “gaming” the modern slavery system.”
Matthew Rycroft to Ed Humpherson: Transparency of Home Office statistics
29 November 2022
“Matthew Rycroft responds to Ed Humpherson’s letter regarding concerns raised with OSR about the transparent release and use of Home Office statistics and data.”
Ed Humpherson to Matthew Rycroft: Transparency of Home Office statistics
21 November 2022
“Ed Humpherson writes to Matthew Rycroft following recent concerns raised with OSR about the transparent release and use of Home Office statistics and data.”
Known limitations
- Small-boat weekly figures are provisional and revised; French prevention counts are operational estimates supplied by French authorities.
- Arrivals data counts detections — people arriving undetected, or clandestinely on larger vessels, are not in it.
- Nationality in arrivals data is as recorded at encounter and in some cases self-reported; age-assessment disputes exist.
- Prison nationality is not immigration status: ‘foreign national’ includes people living in the UK lawfully, and prison totals say nothing about irregular migrants by themselves.
- Census context is England and Wales only (Scotland and Northern Ireland ran separate censuses) and reflects March 2021.
- Local-authority accommodation counts are point-in-time snapshots; contingency sites open and close between quarters.
- Employment figures (ONS table A12) are Labour Force Survey estimates — small samples are volatile, and country of birth is not nationality. The workbook is a legacy binary file whose extraction needs a local Python step; if a refresh cannot reach it, the previous quarter's figures are retained and dated rather than approximated.
Corrections
If a figure here misquotes its source, email corrections@migrationwatchdog.com with the page and the source document. Errors are corrected with a dated note on the affected page. Errors in the underlying official statistics should be reported to their publisher; we reflect published revisions at the next refresh.
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