The Government has lost no time in responding to a report in the Daily Telegraph today, suggesting that up to one in 12 people living in London is here illegally. And the gist is, nothing to see here, folks. Move along. Or as a Home Office spokesman put it, “This report is deeply flawed. It is based on outdated and limited research, which was conducted under the previous government.”
Well, of course it’s flawed; some of the data goes back to 2017. And it is almost certainly an underestimate of the actual numbers of people here illegally. It is, however, the nearest we’ve come recently to putting a number on a phenomenon with a bearing on everything from community cohesion (code for people not liking it much when migrants settle here illegally), utilities (more people, more demand for water, sewage, gas et al) and social infrastructure (everyone, whatever their status, needs hospitals and schools).
The report was commissioned by Thames Water to estimate actual demand for its services and the Telegraph obtained the report as a result of what it calls a freedom of information-style request. It was conducted by a group called Edge Analytics, demography and data experts at Leeds University, who tried to quantify the “hidden” and “transient” users to help the company meet demand. It says the figures are based on academic estimates of illegal migrants nationally, including the Pew Research Centre in the US, London School of Economics, Office for National Statistics data and other research. It then used National Insurance registrations for non-EU foreign nationals over a nine-year period to estimate the number of “irregular” migrants in each London borough.
Thank you for that, Thames Water – even if the company is now desperately trying to reassure us that it had absolutely no say in the conclusions of the report.
The report concludes that there are about a million people in the country illegally, and about six in 10 live in London. Is anyone surprised? Me, I’d say that the number is far higher; David Wood, former Deputy Chief Executive of the UK Border Agency, whom I have heard speak about this, estimated back in 2019 that the number of people settling here illegally was probably 150,000 a year. In fact, if the then Conservative government had taken to heart a report that he and journalist Alasdair Palmer wrote on this subject, called The Politics of Fantasy, we wouldn’t now be in this situation.
We need to know who is actually in the country
There are two important points about all this. One is that the report suggests most of these people arrived in the UK on work, study or visitor visas and then overstayed. In other words, the things that governments get terrifically exercised about – people crossing the Channel on small boats – is not actually the most important element in illegal migration. What matters more are the people who come here perfectly legally and then do not return home when they should.
Last year, for instance, visas were issued to 444,000 people to study here; 453,000 to work, 87,000 for family reunion; and 2.13 million to visit. Now of course we want people to live and study here, but we also need to ensure that they don’t stay longer than their visa allows. Most people do not abuse their visa, but if even a small proportion does, it amounts to a whopping number over time. And what is not clear is to what extent the Border Agency is on the case of those who are coming to the end of their visa period to remind them. A proper agency would clock people coming in and going out. We need to know who is actually in the country.
Which brings me to the second important element of all this, the fact that there aren’t proper, authorised government figures, or rather, estimates, about the numbers of people here illegally. The Government argues that due to the difficulty in estimating the exact size of the irregular population, no official estimates have been produced since 2005. What? Twenty years ago? The government argues that it’s hard to define or cover the irregular population. Well, I think you and I, dear reader, could have a pretty good go at defining people who are here illegally and who outstay their visas. The real question is why the Government hasn’t made it a priority to find out is that it really doesn’t want to know the answer. If it did, it would have to remove rather more than the 16,400 illegal migrants it has returned since taking office and it would have to admit that the problem isn’t just a matter of people smugglers and small boats.
This failure even to ask the right questions is obviously true of the Tories, who presided over the collapse in immigration control, more than Labour. Indeed, if ministers had any sense, they’d be dealing with this as a legacy Tory issue and getting credit for going where the last government didn’t. The last party leader I can recall who was brave enough to raise the issue was former Tory leader, Michael Howard, who suggested that national identity cards could be a way of solving the problem of establishing who should, and shouldn’t be in the country. Everyone sneered at the time, including this paper. But now I think he was right.
If the Government is so sure that the Thames Water report is wrong about there being a million people in the country illegally, it could always produce its own figures, and substantiate them. Instead it’s telling us that we shouldn’t even be talking about it. Well, the voters will be the judge of that. Trust me, they will.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
