No movement from ONS on excluding students from migration statistics

In the run-up to the general election, some hoped that part of Labour’s pledge to depoliticise international students would involve taking them out of net migration statistics – and therefore out of the public glare, given how politicised the biannual ONS release has become.

There were always big methodological issues with doing so, not least around maintaining parity with how other countries do it and meeting the UN’s definitions. But aware of “potential stakeholder interest,” the ONS set out earlier this year to gauge appetite among experts and the general public to produce an additional measure of net migration, one that excluded international students. The findings of this consultation exercise have been released today, and to cut a long story story the ONS has decided to take it no further.

It’s a policy from a different era, really – when politicians talked of getting net migration down to the tens of thousands, and the political issues around international students were that there were too many for the liking of some and they were seen to be taking places from home students.

Fast forward to today, and the fact of international fees propping up the higher education system is fairly well appreciated – the political debate is much more dominated by an assumption by some that they are all coming over here with a view to staying on indefinitely. Seen through this lens, politicians (and universities) trying to use different figures would be an extremely unpopular move in certain quarters.

And it is certainly true that anyone who’s been calling for the exclusion of international students from net migration statistics is typically doing it alongside asserting that the overwhelming majority will leave quite promptly – a claim that has not held water for a while. The ONS’ finding that around half of students arriving in 2020 still held leave after three years was mentioned in the immigration white paper, while the Migration Advisory Committee’s latest report posits a longer term stay rate of 26 per cent for those on student visas.

Some 51 per cent of respondents to the consultation (a mix of government departments, academics, local authorities and other stakeholders) said their first preference was for things to stay as they were. They suggested it might be confusing to have multiple measures, it might reduce trust in official statistics if it was being done to suit a particular narrative, and it would distract from the reality of how many people are actually in the UK.

Doing nothing was also the second preference of around 20 per cent, as two other options were put forward – one was simply to deduct ONS’ current student statistics from the overall figure and publish this, and the other was to do lots of additional statistical work using visa information to generate new data. For the former, some respondents felt that this could already be done by anyone who wanted to, and for the latter it was seen as too complex and likely to lead to much greater error bars.

A handful of other options to explore were put forward by those consulted, including the ONS creating rolling averages of net migration over three, five and seven years – “smoothing out” the figures to negate the effects of – for example – post-pandemic booms, and therefore hopefully discourage policymakers from coming to snap judgements. This is what Universities UK has been asking for recently. One stakeholder said:

In setting Option 1 as our preference, we do not believe that the ONS should ‘do nothing’ – however, there are significant concerns over the implications for the public understanding of migration data and public policy from both Option 2 and Option 3.

Another recommendation was for migration estimates at lower levels of geography. The ONS has said it will take all the suggestions onboard and “look for opportunities to take these forward as part of our research and development work.” Given the statistics body’s widely reported problems with capacity and recent plans to refocus on its core work, it seems likely that things will continue as they are, for the medium term at least.