Can Britain trust its economic statistics? The nation’s arbiters of numerical truth, the Office for National Statistics, yesterday released what on the face of it was good news for the Home Office and a vindication of the previous Conservative government’s policies to reduce worker visas and the number of dependants of migrants arriving in the UK. But in truth – and in the same data dump – the previous year’s figure had been revised up so much (by 307,000) that had it not been, the net migration figure published yesterday would have matched the previous record high.
These revisions matter. Douglas McWilliams, founder of the Centre for Economics and Business Research, calculates that the new figures mean the previous June population estimate changes by a large enough amount that the second quarter fall in GDP per capita may be twice as bad as officially estimated (from 0.3 per cent to 0.6
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