Migration policy decisions require better data, peers told

Some of the UK’s leading academics have told the House of Lords that there is little reliable data on the citizens of other European Union countries living and working in the UK.

The comments were made in evidence given to the House of Lords EU Home Affairs subcommittee on 30 November by the economist Jonathan Portes (pictured), a senior fellow in the Economic and Social Research Council’s programme UK in a Changing Europe, and Madeleine Sumption, director of the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory.

Both experts told the committee about gaps in the data held by the government and other institutions. For example, a question such as how many EU citizens were in the UK on 23 June, the day of the UK referendum on membership of the EU, cannot be answered.