Back in August, I brought to your attention the immigration figure for the 12 months to the end of June 2015 of 636,000 people, including 132,000 returning Brits. These figures come from the International Passenger Survey and there have been requests to HMRC for detail on the National Insurance Numbers (NINo’s) issued over the same period.
HMRC have confirmed that they do have this information but say that it is covered by an exemption for information “held for the formulation or development of government policy”. They have declined to release the detail saying that “HMRC is satisfied that the public interest in maintaining the exception outweighs the public interest in disclosure”.
However we do have NINo figures from the department of Work and Pensions (DWP). These tell us that 917,000 NINo’s were issued to “adult overseas nationals” in the 12 months to June 2015. Some of these may have come here for less than 12 months and would therefore not classify as immigrants under the IPS. Returning Brits would already have NINO’s, so we might expect from the IPS numbers that there would be only 524,000 NINo’s issued to “adult overseas nationals”.
When you add in the children and non-working adults (parents?) coming with these “adult overseas nationals” it would seem that the actual immigration figure for the 12 months to June 2015 is probably about double the IPS figure used by David Cameron and regularly quoted in the press.
What a pity that our government does not trust us to know what the real figures are!
I am indebted again to Peter Cawthron for bringing this to my attention. He writes at more length on the UKIP Clacton website http://ukipclacton.com/wp/.