Shambles over migrant figures

Last Modified: 30 Oct 2007
By: Cathy Newman

Whatever the figure, more than half of all the jobs created in the last ten years have gone to foreign or foreign-born workers.

It's been a day of new figures and new apologies, with the Tories in hot pursuit of both the Work and Pensions Ministry and the Office of National Statistics.

Ministerial apology

The Home Secretary today apologised after official figures understated the number of foreign workers by 300,000.

This evening, it appeared that the government had slipped up again, after the Tories unearthed a parliamentary answer from July showing an extra 400,000 people born overseas have come here to work since 1997.

Ministers insisted tonight though that they all held British passports so should not be counted as foreign workers.

The immigration minister admits the mistakes are a setback.

Immigration data is key

Data on immigration is used to determine where £100bn a year of public money is spent in grants to local authorities, the NHS and other public services. If the figures are wrong, money could be wasted.

Officials only discovered their mistake as they attempted to answer parliamentary questions to the former minister Frank Field.

But he today showed Channel 4 News information from the House of Commons library suggesting the corrected figures may still be wrong - because the government has based its latest estimate of the number of foreign workers on 2003 figures - a year before thousands of Eastern European workers came to the UK.