Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)

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I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about the collection and publication of data on immigration status, nationality and country of birth of certain persons, including relating to users of certain public services, claimants of certain benefits, the prison population, and arrests; to require that such data is published at least once per calendar year; to require the Secretary of State to review the quality and consistency of any such data collected and published; and for connected purposes.

I firmly believe that for nearly three decades, migration to this country has been too high, and it remains so. Every election-winning manifesto since 1974 has promised to reduce migration, yet since 1997, with the unsurprising exception of 2020, net migration has run at more than 100,000 people per year. Like Governments before them, the last Government promised to reduce migration; as my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch) has said, they failed to do so. To paraphrase my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy), mass migration is the single biggest broken promise in British politics, and the single biggest reason that trust in our politics is in such short supply.

Whatever we believe, though, it is an objective fact that our national conversation about immigration is often hampered by shockingly poor data—when that data even exists at all. My hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) has worked for years to highlight this problem. As the Migration Observatory, a group of academics at the University of Oxford, noted just last week, migration data is plagued by

“gaps and quality issues which reflect structural and long-term problems with data siloes, disorganised databases and failures to keep complete records”.

All in all, the Migration Observatory identified 10 areas of public policy that are being undermined by a lack of high-quality migration data.

All of this starts with the fundamental question: how many people are in this country, and who are they? The truth is that we do not know. Remarkably, the United Kingdom does not have a proper system of entry and exit checks; we do not record the number of people arriving in the country, or the number of people leaving it. The migration figures that are published every year are just best guesses. When people do arrive here, we do not have comprehensive data on exactly where they have come from, or where in the country they might be moving to. Our best guess comes once a decade, at the census, but given the scale and pace of migration since the last census in 2021, that information will now almost certainly be hopelessly out of date.

Recently, the Office for National Statistics issued new figures on net migration for 2024. Using those new methods, the ONS now thinks that emigration of British nationals had been underestimated by two thirds of a million people between 2021 and 2024. For years, policy in this country was made on the basis of the old guess, which showed British national emigration running at below average. The new figures invite serious questions about why so many British nationals—the vast majority of them young—are leaving this country, yet for years the official data showed that there was no such problem, so the conversation in this place never proceeded beyond the level of anecdote.

When people do arrive here, we know far too little about them. We do not know the number of foreign criminals who have been awarded visas since 2021, or where they have come from. We do not have the full information on how many people move between the asylum system and the formal legal migration system. In the case of EU migrants, we do not know why these people are coming here, or how many of them already have EU settled status.

All of this concerns the flow of migrants coming to this country, not those who are already here. When it comes to assessing the contribution of migrants who are already here, our understanding is even worse. In 2020, data about income tax and national insurance contributions broken down by nationality was discontinued. We have no such data by visa type, and following the collapse of the labour force survey, we have little data on the earnings or employment rate of migrants by immigration status, visa type or nationality. We do not know the immigration status of benefits claimants for benefits other than universal credit, which makes up about half of our working-age benefit spend, and when it comes to universal credit, we do not have detailed nationality data on claimants. We do not know how much migrants are costing this country in legal aid or in translation services, and we do not know what proportion of eligible foreign nationals are receiving pension benefits. We do not know the total cost, in any given year, to the NHS or to state education of migrants, pre and post having been given indefinite leave to remain. We do not have full official figures on the total number of foreign nationals in social housing, or where those in social housing were born. Without data on what migrants are contributing to the public purse, and what they might be costing, we cannot possibly have a full and informed conversation about the relative impact of migration on the taxpayer, and we cannot, in turn, make fully informed decisions about who should come here, from where, and under what conditions.

Fiscal contributions are not the only important measure. When it comes to data on migrant crime, the picture is just as patchy, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) has repeatedly highlighted. While we do have figures, albeit outdated, on the prison population by nationality, we still do not have full official data on the number of people arrested by nationality, the immigration status of prisoners or the number of people by nationality sentenced, but not imprisoned. The indicative data that we do have about migrant crime has been obtained via freedom of information requests, and it is often incomplete or disputed. It is also hard to assess over time, because it is not released on a consistent basis. In the absence of any alternative, however, it is the basis on which we must conduct the debate. We have no information at all on the nationality or immigration status of those referred to Prevent, which is a glaring gap in our ability to combat extremism.

All this—everything I have said—relates only to the UK’s legal population. We do not have, and have not had for some time, a credible estimate of the number of people who are in this country illegally. There has been no official attempt to combine datasets that we could use—such as utility usage, health registrations, census data and grocery purchases—to establish the number, so we cannot know what pressure this might be putting on public services and infrastructure, and we cannot properly assess how much money needs to be invested in our Border Force and immigration enforcement.

We do not have any information about internal deportation targets in immigration enforcement and Border Force, or what proportion of those targets are being met. We do not know what happens to asylum seekers who have been refused asylum, but who have not been returned to their home country. We do not know how often, and in what context, human rights-based claims are made to thwart removal, and how often those claims are successful, particularly as we do not yet have access to the judgments of the first-tier immigration tribunal. How can we possibly have a well informed conversation about illegal migration without a full understanding of the facts?

Those of us who wish to end the era of mass migration are often the loudest voices calling for more data, yet those who believe that this period of mass migration has been a good thing for our country should be the biggest supporters of more comprehensive and accurate data on the impact of migration. We are often told, including in this House, that the British people have been misled, or misinformed, about the true impact of immigration on our country, and that mass migration has in fact been better for this country than many believe. If that is the case, let us see it in the data. If, as many Members of other parties claim, the majority of migrants are a net fiscal positive, let us see it in the data. If, in fact, migrants are no more likely to commit crime than British nationals, let us see it in the data. Based on the indicative data that we do have, I believe that to be exceedingly unlikely, but until we have access to the full facts, the conversation about migration in this place and across our country will necessarily fall short.

There is no good reason to oppose a better-informed national conversation around immigration. More data and evidence would allow us to make better decisions about who should be allowed to come to and stay in our country, and in what numbers. It would allow us to truthfully assess the impact of different migrant groups, moving us on from generalisations about the whole of migration, towards a more productive conversation about the relative contributions of specific migrant groups by nationality and visa type. Most importantly, it would provide transparency for the British people and enable more detailed scrutiny of any Government’s policy on migration.

In countries such as Denmark, where migrant contribution data is published regularly, the Government trust their citizens to consider the data, consider their policies and, in turn, to make up their own mind about whether they support the action being taken. After decades of broken promises, the very least the British people deserve is the right and ability to scrutinise, in full, the migration policy of their elected Government. I sincerely hope that Ministers in the Home Office and across Government will recognise that and work with the Office for National Statistics to produce a more comprehensive and accurate dataset in the years ahead.

Immigration policy cannot be set in isolation. The people living in this country are this country, so the flow of people coming here necessarily has an impact on every area of our lives. Governments do not exist independently of the nations that they govern, and nations do not exist independently of the people who constitute them. They are, wholly and entirely, a result of those people, their collective contributions and their collective failings. Immigration policy, therefore, is upstream of our public finances, the health of our public services, the cost of housing, the quality of our schools, the population of our prisons, the cohesion of our communities, and the strength of our democracy. The very least that we can do, when discussing an issue of such enormous importance, is ensure that public policy is properly informed by the full facts.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Katie Lam, Neil O’Brien, Chris Philp, Claire Coutinho, Matt Vickers, Sarah Bool, Lewis Cocking, Jack Rankin, Harriet Cross, Mr Peter Bedford, Mr Andrew Snowden and Bradley Thomas bring in the Bill.

Katie Lam accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 16 January 2026, and to be printed (Bill 348).