Claims of Covid-driven migrant exodus from UK overstated, says ONS

Claims that coronavirus has sparked a mass exodus of immigrants from the UK are overstated, but payroll data indicate a shift in the foreign population from Europeans to other nationalities, the Office for National Statistics said on Tuesday.

Commentators had pointed to a big drop in the number of non-UK nationals responding to ONS’s labour force survey, arguing that if this was representative of changes in the UK population, it could mean that more than 1m people had left the country last year. But others said the outflow was likely to be smaller because the survey figures could be skewed by changes in the way the data was collected, with migrants less likely to respond to a telephone survey than face-to-face.

The ONS said an analysis of real-time tax data, which should be more reliable than survey responses, showed that EU nationals, especially those working in London, had been more likely to leave employment over the past year than non-EU nationals or UK-born employees.

Jonathan Athow, deputy national statistician, said this “might suggest a change in the composition of the UK population away from EU nationals”, although the data do not show whether those who lost jobs had also left the country.

This could have a lasting impact on the shape of the UK’s workforce, given that EU nationals who have left the UK could find it difficult to return once the labour market recovers, unless they have already obtained settled status.

By cross-referencing payroll data with information on National Insurance numbers, ONS found that the number of EU employees on UK companies’ payrolls stood at 2.3m in the last quarter of 2020, 184,000 fewer than a year earlier, a drop of 7.4 per cent.

This compared with a drop of 2.6 per cent in the number of UK-born employees, and a rise of 0.3 per cent in the number of non-EU nationals.

This was likely to reflect the sectors where people of different nationalities were most likely to work, ONS said, with EU-born workers concentrated in London’s hospitality industry.

But it was a far more modest change than that implied by the labour force survey. ONS said survey data seemed to be “significantly overstating” reality, because it pointed to a year-on-year fall of more than 550,000 in the foreign-born workforce, equivalent to a drop of 15 per cent.

Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London who first drew attention to the drop in the non-UK workforce, said the new analysis “certainly suggests our ‘upper bound’ of 1.3m is overstated” but added that the uncertainties remained huge, not least because the tax data do not cover the self-employed workforce, where immigrants are over-represented.

It also confirmed that ONS had been significantly overestimating the number of UK nationals in employment, he added.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford university, said the figures confirmed that London had been hardest hit, with a steep fall of 10.6 per cent in the number of EU employees and the only regional decline in non-EU employees.

But she added that the figures did not show whether people had left the UK, as EU citizens who had lost jobs “may still be here, unemployed”, while others temporarily working from abroad informally would still appear in the figures.