FactCheck: Brown backtracks on immigration
Updated on 31 March 2010
Prime Minister Gordon Brown revises the statistics he has quoted for the second time in a fortnight following a FactCheck investigation, and is ticked off by the Statistics Authority.
Last week Cathy Newman's FactCheck found that the prime minister had got in a muddle on immigration figures.
Today the chair of the Statistics Authority, Sir Michael Scholar, confirmed in writing to Mr Brown that he had misquoted the statistics. FactCheck contacted the authority about Mr Brown's claim last week, and it subsequently launched its own inquiry.
The prime minister claimed in a podcast that net inward migration fell from 237,000 in 2007 to 163,000 in 2008 and to 147,000 last year. But Cathy Newman's FactCheck found that he had been using two sets of statistics.
Mr Brown used the Office for National Statistics' long-term international migration figures for 2007 and 2008 (although he gave the wrong number for 2007, saying 237,000 instead of 233,000). The figure for 2009 is not yet available from the ONS.
Instead the prime minister took a figure from the International Passenger Survey (147,000). However, long-term international migration figures from the IPS tend to be smaller than those from the ONS, as the IPS excludes those people who overstay their original visas and asylum seekers.
Mr Brown updated his numbers in today's speech on immigration, acknowledging: "We don't yet have the long-term migration figures for the twelve months to the end of 2009."
It is not the first time in recent weeks Mr Brown has had to backtrack following a FactCheck investigation. Two weeks ago, he told MPs that he was writing to change his evidence to the Iraq inquiry after we revealed he got his number wrong on funding for the Ministry of Defence.
In his letter to the prime minister, Sir Michael Scholar wrote -
"You will see that the note points out that the podcast did not use comparable data series for 2007 to 2009, and that it did not take account of the revised estimate of long-term net immigration for 2007.
"I note that in your speech today you correctly referred to the statistics in respect of migration for the period 2007 to 2009.
"The Statistics Authority hopes that in the political debate over the coming weeks all parties will be careful in their use of statistics, to protect the integrity of official statistics."
How the parties stand
Labour: an Australian-style points-based system. Non-EU nationals need to get enough points to stay in the UK.
Conservative: an annual limit, returning net immigration to mid-1990s levels – in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands.
UKIP: shut the door completely.
Liberal Democrats: expand the government’s points system by targeting immigration at under-populated areas.
Studio debate: Phil Woolas and Damian Green
Immigration minister Phil Woolas and Conservative immigration spokesman Damian Green joined Jon Snow in the studio.
Phil Woolas said the programme had omitted to give a quote from Gordon Brown on Friday in which the prime minister had said "provisional figures". The fact is, he said, that the immigration figures were down – and that was what was important.
Mr Woolas denied he was saying that Sir Michael Scholar was wrong, and he said said he was pleased about the row over immigration because it shows that whichever figures you use, the figures are down.
Damian Green replied that Gordon Brown had again been caught fiddling figures. When Labour came to power net immigration was running in the 40,000s, he said. Under Labour it had been running at 200,000-plus a year,
But because of the recession, according to Mr Green, immigration had come down a bit – and would probably continue to do so "if Labour keep running a long recession".
He said the way to keep immigration down was to have a proper cap on the system: "We need to do things to get the system under control at all times."
Phil Woolas said that in the past Labour had been accused of not talking about immigration, but "nobody can accuse us of that now". He claimed asylum was now at a 20-year low and border control was the best it has ever been.
And he asserted that if people could be convinced that the government was in control of immigration, it offered a platform to make the case for the benefits of immigration.
Damian Green said a Conservative government would not shut the borders completely but said that there would be substantially lower immigration. And he took issue with Cathy Newman’s report which said there was not much difference between the main political parties’ policies on immigration.
"A Conservative government would deliver much lower levels of immigration – and that’s what the country needs," he said.
Mr Green pledged a reduction in the new of work visas and controls on people coming into the UK to get married to create "a pause for breath" in immigration into the country.
