Revisions to immigration statistics – designed to improve the accuracy of local government's finance settlement – are doomed to failure because they do not account for increasing short-term immigration, an influential think-tank has warned. The author of an Institute for Public Policy Research study into UK immigration and emigration flows published on 6 August told The MJ finance settlements for councils ‘are very unlikely to reflect genuine demand on local public services until the Office for National Statistics changes its measurement of short-term immigration'. Jill Rutter, a senior research fellow at the IPPR, last week published a study warning that increasing numbers of immigrants to the UK were staying for a short time and then leaving. The outflow in the past two years, she estimated, was close to 400,000. But even under proposed ONS revisions to immigration statistics, councils would not receive annual cash allocations based on the number of immigrants using local services for short periods. Ms Rutter said: ‘Accurate population statistics are crucial to the local government and NHS funding settlements and, where there are high levels of short-term immigration and emigration, population statistics are likely to be wrong. Even under the revised system, the national data sets, from which [local] funding is drawn, do not account for short-term immigration.' The CLG has come under intense pressure to improve its measurement of immigration. Authorities such as Westminster City and Slough councils claim they have been left short-changed by annual grant settlements because statisticians failed to reflect high rates of short-term tourists, students or those on working visas who return home.
