What do net migration figures capture and are they accurate? How do we actually count people migrating to and from the UK? Are eyebrow-raising recent statistics on migration and crime and on an ‘exodus’ of British nationals really to be believed?
In this week’s episode of the podcast, I put these questions and more to Madeleine Sumption, Director of the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory. We also talked about what she’s learned from her experience working with journalists and politicians on how to communicate and make sense of migration data. In the clip above, she shares a trick for communicating statistics which might seem a bit unexpected coming from a dyed-in-the-wool numbers nerd. But I have to say, I agree with her completely.
Listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or read the transcript below. I’ll be taking a break from recording now and will be back in the new year with the next batch of guests.
TRANSCRIPT
GEORGINA
My guest this week is Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory, an independent research organisation based at the University of Oxford, and which many consider the UK’s most reliable and authoritative source of analysis on migration policy and statistics. Before her present role, Madeleine was Director of Research at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington DC.
She’s now also Deputy Chair of the UK Government’s Migration Advisory Committee and an advisor to the Office for National Statistics. Her accolades and achievements are far too many to mention, although I should add that in 2017 she was given an MBE for Surfaces to Social Science. For the benefit of listeners, Madeleine and I work together at the Migration Observatory where I get to witness her brilliance first-hand. Madeleine, welcome to the show.
MADELEINE
Thanks for having me.
GEORGINA
So I wanted to have you on here because immigration is quite a hot topic at the moment. And it’s the focus of a lot of policy discussions and a lot of big ideas. And in order to have those kind of discussions properly, the people having them needs to have reliable data. But as I know from working in this field for a while now, that’s not always what we get. But before we get to all of that, Could you tell me a little bit more about yourself? How did you come to be director of the Migration Observatory, having been based in Washington DC before that?
MADELEINE
Yeah, so I spent most of my 20s in the US, including six years at the Migration Policy Institute, which is the think tank in Washington, DC. And I was there doing mostly international comparisons of immigration policies across the world, including in the UK, but not exclusively. But I’ve always had an interest in stats and data. And so then when this position at the Migration Observatory came up, It was very interesting to me. I’d been keeping an eye on the Migration Observatory because it had been around for just a few years at that point and liked its style, so it seemed like a good thing to do.
GEORGINA
So you went there in 2013, was it?
MADELEINE
I started the Migration Observatory in 2014, was three, four years after it, well, three and a half years after it started,
GEORGINA
And but you were involved in the whole setup. Well, in the early stages of it, you were somewhat involved. No, OK.
MADELEINE
No, no, I was not involved. was just watching from afar thinking, these people are doing interesting things. But I was not involved until I until I got the job as Derek.
GEORGINA
Do you know now, I suppose, more about how the Migration Observatory came into being and why? Was it in response to anything in particular?
MADELEINE
Yes, it was launched in 2011 and it was partly in response to the fact that there was this confusing morass of data. You had figures from mostly from the Home Office and from the Office of National Statistics at that point. at that time, they’ve actually upped their game a lot, I think. But at that time, a lot of the stats were just really difficult to understand and to find. And the explanations that came with them weren’t very good. And so part of the original idea is we’re just going to have one place where people can go to and actually just be told what are these statistics and what do they mean.
That was part of it. The other really big thing was to try and fill a gap in the debate at the time by having an impartial voice on migration on the basis that a lot of other organisations are in this field, but mostly with some kind of political perspective, or if not necessary, part of your political perspective, then at least a view on whether high or a lower migration or more or less restrictive immigration policies are good idea. So the idea was to set something up that could be trusted by people across the spectrum regardless of their political opinions on migration.
GEORGINA
And it’s managed to maintain that reputation since then, which is, well, I don’t want to jinx anything, but it’s quite remarkable given, like you said, a lot of other organisations in this field have an agenda or at least they’re perceived as having one. Now, I want to get a bit more into the weeds of migration data now, but easing in gently. Measuring migration might seem straightforward, at least to people who are not embedded in it like us. But really you would think that we can just count people coming in and out of a given country, wouldn’t you? But actually it’s a lot more complicated than that. So can you explain to listeners what’s so hard about just counting people migrating from one country to another?
MADELEINE
think probably the biggest single problem is that we have so many people crossing borders, often for just short visits, and most of that is not migration, but some of it is migration. And the challenge for statisticians is to separate out the people who are just popping to Paris for a weekend and the people who are actually migrating.
So you’ve got sort of millions and millions of data points of people coming in and out, and then you’ve got to work out which ones of those are the actual migration events where someone is really changing their place of residence for a meaningful amount of time. There are also some specific issues that we have in the UK. Some other countries face them more than others, depending on their data systems, which is that in order to understand, if you wanted to have an approach where you count everyone in and count them out again You’ve got to link up each time that someone comes into a country to the time that that same person goes out again if they do go out. And that is actually more difficult than it sounds for various reasons. So one of them is that we’ve got a lot of dual citizens.
So in the UK case, if someone is a UK citizen and say a Polish citizen, they may leave and arrive on different passports. And so your border records are going to… that that’s gonna look like two different people potentially. There are ways to link up those data sources, they get, it’s not as completely accurate. We then also have various holes in the data. The classic one is people who come into the UK and then leave via the Republic of Ireland or vice versa, because they wouldn’t be picked up in border data when they’re moving between the UK and the Republic of Ireland. So those all, those Types of things create challenges and then just because of the volume of travel, because you’ve got so many people coming in and out, even actually quite a small error in the travel data of someone who’s actually just a traveller being picked up as a migrant, that can have a really big impact on the migration data because the vast majority of people traveling at any one point in time are not actually people migrating.
GEORGINA
So you mentioned some of the ways in which it’s difficult in the UK specific case. Is it actually harder for us than other countries? Or is there also an element of we’ve made it a bit more complicated than it needs to be?
MADELEINE
I think different countries measure migration slightly different ways. I think there are some settings. If you look at New Zealand, for example, they have quite good migration statistics and it is just easier for them because it’s an island. They don’t have the issue of the land border. They don’t have many airports. They certainly don’t have people arriving on trains. And so all of that, I think, just makes the task of collecting that border data much, much simpler.
Some countries obviously have population registers and that can have some statistical benefits, although there are also problems with population registers, People, know, particularly related to whether people who leave are actually removed from the population register or not. So I think the UK, I think every country has some variance on the specific challenges. I think there are relatively few where it’s just a super easy task. And I think one of the reasons actually that we’re so aware of some of the problems in our migration data in the UK is because we have so much of it and then people start to compare different sources and realise like why doesn’t this line up with that and actually in some other countries those things might just go unnoticed because people just take the statistics at face value.
GEORGINA
Yeah, you don’t know what you don’t know in some of the cases. And when we talk about net migration, what does that mean?
MADELEINE
So net migration is this measure that we use a lot more in the UK actually than the policymakers and the public in other countries. And this is basically a measure of the number of people of international migrants or British citizens in fact arriving in the country minus the number leaving. Now in the UK, when we talk about net migration, we’re actually looking specifically at people who are moving for at least a year, at least 12 months. So if people go away for three months, and then come back, then they wouldn’t necessarily be counted as a long-term migrant. The precise cutoff is at 12 months, is at six months, isn’t necessarily that important. The basic upshot of all of this is that net migration is measuring the contribution that international migration makes to population growth in the country.
GEORGINA
Immigration minus emigration, the number being added to the population. And those are kind of migration flow figures, people coming in and out in quite a general sense. And those are the responsibility of the Office for National Statistics, aren’t they? So those are the official estimates. There are a whole load of other statistics on migration that are published mainly by the Home Office. Could you explain what those are and in what way they’re different to those ONS flow figures.
MADELEINE
Yeah, the Home Office is publishing basically its own administrative data. the various, which come from the records of actually running the immigration system, right? So people that they encounter, people that they grant a visa to, people that they detain. Effectively, whenever there’s a sort of event in the actual management of migration, that can in theory be tracked statistically, and then you can get quite useful statistics out of that. So some of them are related, you know, probably quite closely related to movement itself. So if someone’s granted a visa, in most cases, that means that person’s gonna come to the country. Others are not really about the moment of migration itself, but more about the status that people have or whether they receive benefits. That’s not Home Office statistic, actually, that’s DWP. We have earnings data from HMRC, from the tax records. there are lots of quite useful administrative data.
That the role of ONS is quite interesting in this because in the past there was a I think a relatively straightforward division of labour between the government departments and ONS. So ONS mostly did surveys and government departments published their own records. Where we are now is slightly more complicated because we’re getting for a whole host of reasons. We’re moving more to using administrative data to understand the phenomenon of migration more generally and so and some of that is now produced so that the Office of National Statistics mainstream migration estimates are produced using those administrative data, those government records, but it’s a much more complicated process in many ways than operating a survey that’s relatively easy to administer. And it also means that there’s actually some ambiguity about where responsibility should sit. So for example, if we want data on migrants’ earnings, when that was done by a survey, that was very much the ONS’s responsibility. Now, those data on earnings would come primarily from tax records, which is an HMRC thing. And so I think there’s, you know, I think more uncertainty about who is the, you which is the right department to be producing different bits of data.
GEORGINA
And the ONS, it’s like you said, it’s now using this Home Office administrative data to produce its own estimates of immigration, net migration, net migration. This is because we’ve had a few issues with the way that they used to estimate net migration in the past, isn’t it? So there were times when people were missed from the official figures and the ONS has also had to make some quite substantial revisions to its figures. Could you tell us a bit more about what’s happened in recent years?
MADELEINE
Yeah, I mean, we’ve seen quite big changes in the way that the UK measures migration because of the switch away from surveys towards administrative data. And while that might sound reasonably straightforward, as I’ve mentioned, using administrative data is extremely complicated. And so some of the revisions, we’ve had different reasons for some of the revisions over time. Some of it was just that there was an error in the data, partly because of the complexity of those databases. So there were quite a few Ukrainians who had just been missing. They had not been picked up in the data the first time around. That was one reason for revision. There are some cases where, because all of this has been sort of developing over time in ONS, they got the statisticians there got access to data sources they previously didn’t have. So for example, they’ve now been able to move to a new method for measuring.
EU citizens coming in and out of the country where previously they were looking mostly just at tax and benefits records. So all of those things, you know, they’re either correcting errors or they’re getting access to new data or developing the methods and that improves the data. Now, hopefully that means that some of those revisions don’t take place again because the errors have now been corrected. In practice, it seems like, you know, there are such a large number of things that could potentially be revised or improved in the data that we do seem to continue to have regular revisions. The ONS, for example, in its most recent publication in November 2025, you know, flagged some specific issues that it wants to fix around family members who have pending applications and so forth. There are also some sources of revisions I think are going, you can’t really be eliminated, at least with the current approach to producing
migration, is that given the timelines, if ONS wants to publish the data relatively quickly and by relatively quickly, mean, like, five months after the end of the period that they’re looking at, they need to anticipate behaviour. They need to know whether someone who’s entered on a visa that lasts 14 months and has been here for six months, are they going to stay over that 12 months that makes them a long-term migrant? And that can be, especially when behaviour is changing, they basically anticipate that based on what people have done in the past.
MADELEINE
So if people start to behave differently to how they did in the past, people coming on visas, then you’re going to get some inaccuracy there that will then need to be revised when they’ve got more complete data.
GEORGINA
And those problems with net migration that you just described, they’re not the only problems that there are with the current evidence base on migration in general. So to go back to what I said earlier, we need reliable data to have the kind of important policy discussions that we’re having. What would you say are other big gaps in the data where it would be really useful to know something, but it’s just not there or it’s not there in the kind of quality that we would need?
MADELEINE
Yeah, I mean, I guess I should start by saying there have actually been a lot of improvements in the data and it’s great that we’ve got data sources now, like for example, linked home office and HMRC tax records that we didn’t have in the past. We have new data on how asylum seekers originally got to the UK. Did they come on a small boat? Did they come on a visa? Some of those things are really good. So I think there is a positive story about some improvements in the data.
We still have some quite significant problems, particularly when we’re looking at people who don’t take a mainstream route through the immigration system. So when you’re looking at data on people who are, you know, if someone arrives on a student visa, maybe they switch to a work visa and then they leave or they get permanent status, the statistics on that are all reasonably good.
The challenge we have is we’ve also got this very complicated system of, we’ve got the asylum system, we’ve got various ways that people can stay in the UK based on human rights laws if they don’t meet the mainstream immigration criteria. There’s the modern slavery system. People can make challenges if they’re liable for removal. So if they don’t have the legal right to be in the UK, they’re liable for removal. They can sometimes challenge that also on human rights grounds.
And what we often see is that people, the same person at various different points in time might make multiple claims through different parts of those systems. And we struggle to link up, or well, from the outside, think also the Home Office internally struggles to link people up and really understand people’s journeys through the system. And that’s actually quite a problem, especially if think now, we’ve got this big debate about the UK’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights, and it would be really useful to know things like how many immigration cases are actually affected by ECHR in different ways and which bits of that human rights system are affecting them. So that’s a big one. mean, guess just to mention one other, I think that we still don’t have quite enough data on the outcomes of migrants with different immigration statuses in the UK.
MADELEINE
So you think thinking about another sort of salient policy debate at the moment, there’s a consultation going on about indefinite leave to remain, so permanent status when people get the right to stay in the UK forever. And there’s a discussion about how easy should it be for people to get indefinite leave to remain? Should when should they get access to benefits? But we really don’t have good enough data on the things like the earnings or the rate at which people with indefinite leave to remain use benefits, which will be really useful when we’re having this debate because the policy will be made probably without a brilliant understanding of precisely what the impacts are going to be on who.
GEORGINA
I mean, we also don’t have a complete understanding of how many people there are with indefinite leave to remain even, right? Because that’s another relatively basic data gap. It’s just on kind of who’s here in the population and of what immigration statuses do they hold. So that’s a big one. I wanted to ask you about a couple of kind of big statistics or kind of big areas that people are talking about in terms of statistics at the moment. And one of them that just came up recently is about British emigration. And I know this has been quite a hard thing to estimate in the past, but we got some net migration figures recently and they were revisions on previous ones. And what they showed was that there’s been a bit of an increase in the net migration of British nationals and net migration for British nationals is negative, which means there’s more going out than coming in. So emigration basically.
And so those new statistics showed that this was this was mainly or in a large proportion of it was people in their 16 to 35 age group. And some people have interpreted this as a kind of exodus or a brain drain of young British people, possibly even in reaction to unhappiness with the state of the UK. That’s what people are saying. Would you agree with that interpretation based on the data that you’ve seen?
MADELEINE
I think the data really don’t tell us enough to draw strong conclusions. We’ve always had net emigration of British citizens from the UK, which makes sense, right? This is the country that produces Brits. So on that, know, at least if some people emigrate, which is the case for almost every country, then you’re going to have usually more people going out than coming back in. It’s hard to know based on the data we have how much is actually changing over the long term, because the data that we have for the most recent period, which suggested net emigration of UK citizens of over 100,000. That looks higher than the figures that we have, the published figures we have for the 2010s, but the 2010s figures were used, were based on a completely different methodology. They were validated, well, they were adjusted against the census, so they’re probably reasonably reliable.
So what we don’t know is whether the current figures, which are higher, back in the 2010s, the figures were usually in the range of 70 to 90,000. rather than 100 plus. But I am not totally confident based on the change of methodology that we’ve actually seen much higher emigration. It could be just that we’re picking up people, perhaps some people because of the uncertainty about the methods, people who haven’t actually emigrated, they’ve just gone quiet in the government systems that the tax and benefits system that the ONS uses to try and identify where the British people are still in the country.
In the last, we do have consistent data using this new method for the last few years, which suggests some change, mostly due to the fact that not more people, not more British citizens emigrating, actually more people who had previously, sorry, fewer people who had previously emigrated coming back to the UK. Again, this is the kind of thing, it may be a real trend, but I would want to see more years of data and a bit more work from the ONS to really get to the bottom of.
the trends that we’re seeing and the methods before being really confident that this is actually telling us something new that’s happening in the world. On the point about government policy, I mean, they’re to tell us nothing at all about why people are leaving. Some of them, it looks from other sources like some of them are previous migrants who came to the UK and then became UK citizens and then are returning possibly with their British-born children to places like Poland and Romania.
Others will be British born British citizens. There are various pushes and pulls. know, dissatisfaction with the UK could be one of them, but the data don’t allow us to measure that directly.
GEORGINA
So would you advise people to be a bit cautious when using these kind of statistics on the basis that they might be revised in the future?
MADELEINE
Particularly the statistics on British citizens. think we’ve gradually seen, we’re seeing improving data and I think the revisions hopefully will be getting smaller. But I think the biggest uncertainty currently, and this is something that ONS very much recognises, the biggest uncertainty currently is around the figures on British citizens rather than the EU and non-EU ones.
GEORGINA
Another area that I wanted to ask you about is crime. There have been a few items in the press in recent months about crimes committed by foreign nationals. And there’s been some data, a lot of it’s come from freedom of information requests. And newspapers have quoted stats showing crime rates by nationality in some cases. Now, there are a few problems with this kind of data, can you explain what those are?
MADELEINE
Sure, we have basically two main sources of data here to work out the rates at which people of different nationalities are convicted of crimes. You’ve got the conviction stats and then they get compared to separate population stats. So to take those in turn, on the conviction side, this is usually Ministry of Justice data obtained by FOI, as you mentioned. And those data is operational data. They’re broadly okay. I think there are some issues.
With the measurement of nationality, it feels very much like self-reported data. So you have England, Wales, and the UK all appearing as separate lines in the data. You’ve got some nationalities that don’t exist anymore, like Abyssinia or Belgian Congo. So it’s not the cleanest data set, but broadly speaking, I think it’s probably fine at a high level to use them when you’re looking at larger groups of people to look at rates of criminal convictions.
I think the more challenging issue is understanding the size of the baseline population of each nationality to compare these numbers of convictions against, because obviously you would expect if there’s a group of much larger population in the UK, then you would expect a larger number of convictions. Now, especially for small groups, there’s some uncertainty when you’re looking at groups like Afghans, for example, that are not traditionally one of the major groups of migrants to the UK, but have become more significant recently. The census is now several years old, so we don’t get a great picture from the census. The other survey data sources, the annual population survey we have, has become much less reliable for this sort of analysis. And if you’re looking at large groups, then, you know, like Poles or Lithuanians, that doesn’t make a huge difference.
With small groups, it really can make a significant difference. And so that means that some of the calculations will be less reliable. That said, I mean, think despite that, we can clearly see that there are differences by nationality. So for example, if you look at the number of people in prison, the unmeasured population from somewhere like Albania or Iran would have to be extremely large in order for you not to conclude that they are overrepresented in the criminal justice system.
And then of course there are other nationalities that are underrepresented like Indian and Chinese citizens. So I think, it’s very much, it’s clear that there is probably quite substantial variation by nationality, which actually has to be expected really, people coming through different visa routes, different backgrounds, different socioeconomic experiences, life experiences. So yeah, it’s just unfortunate that we can’t be completely confident about some of those finer grained calculations looking at small groups.
GEORGINA
Because the bottom line is there is no data set, there’s no official data set which shows the population of the UK by nationality, unless you take a census which is only done every 10 years.
MADELEINE
That’s right, and my hope is that we will eventually get something between censuses that provides a more accurate snapshot at any one point in time of how many people with different nationalities are living in the UK. There are administrative records that help you get at that, at least for those people who are operating in the formal economy. I think there’s always going to be a challenge measuring groups of people. If you have certain nationalities where a higher share of people either entered without permission or maybe have been refused asylum and unauthorised migrants in the UK, I think it’s never going to be possible to have completely accurate measures of how many people in that situation are in the UK.
GEORGINA
Okay, that’s enough of the heavy data stuff. I want to talk a bit more now about how migration data is used because you’re someone who has worked extensively with politicians, with the media. And so you’ve got a lot of experience of talking to people about migration statistics who are not necessarily experts in their own right. So I wanted to ask what, in your experience, is the most important migration statistic for politicians and for the public and the media? Is there one number that you notice people get really hung up on?
MADELEINE
Yeah, I think the answer to this has to be net migration. It’s the most salient figure. There are other numbers that people do focus on, know, particular points in time, the number of people, of asylum seekers who are supported in hotels, for example, is something that currently gets a lot of focus in the political debate. But the one that year in, year out, at least for the last 20 years or so has had had the most attention, I think, is net migration. it’s because it is used because it sums up the overall scale of migration and it’s used as a metric to judge how restrictive or liberal immigration policies are.
And I think one of the reasons it’s particularly salient is because of the net migration targets that was introduced under several administrations ago now in 2010 under the conservative government at the time. And I think that also put this particular statistic on the map because the government had made a high profile pledge to reduce it. It created a relatively straightforward way for people to judge government policy and say, are they succeeding or failing based on their own metrics? And I think that’s also raised the profile of this particular statistic in the debate.
GEORGINA
Yeah, and you do still get people making pledges, people, mean politicians making pledges now about net migration. And I’ve always found it an interesting one because while you can somewhat control immigration, and we’ve arguably got more control over that than ever, you’ve really got no control at all over emigration, which is the other side of that equation that makes up net migration.
MADELEINE
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And I think it does make it challenging. It’s probably one of the reasons why what you often see is politicians saying we would like lower levels of net migration, but not actually putting a specific number on it because of this uncertainty about whether they’re going to be able to deliver it and what will happen to emigration. In theory, obviously, there’s no reason that the pledges have to be about net migration. There are lots of other things in the debate. You could look at immigration numbers. You could look at the number of people getting permanent status.
But think net migration has been sticky in the political debate, just because once it became established as the main figure that ONS produces that people are looking out for, I think politicians are going to be asked what their position is on that number, even if they actually would rather talk about something else.
GEORGINA
And so you’ve worked with, you’ve briefed a lot of politicians, you’ve given evidence in parliament, this sort of thing. But I also know from my House of Commons library days that when you’re trying to explain migration figures or any kind of statistics to non-experts, it can be quite hard to get across all the nuances and the caveats without getting completely into the technical weeds. So what have you learned from your experience of this about how to communicate statistics.
MADELEINE
This might sound counterintuitive, but I think probably my top tip would be not, when you communicate statistics, not to use too many numbers. I think if the number isn’t needed for you to understand the story, then you don’t necessarily need to include it because the point of statistics, so if you’re looking at, you know, what happened to net migration, for example, saying that it increased a lot or it tripled.
is much easier than saying for people to understand than saying it went up from around 250,000 to 900 and something thousand and then it fell down again to, I think people get lost in those specific numbers because really the point of the statistics is just to be able to tell a story in a more rigorous way than you might be able to do without statistics. And so once you’ve identified what that story is, that should be in the foreground, I think, and then the statistics themselves maybe play more of a supporting role in the background.
GEORGINA
I remember when I had to get my book, Bad Data, checked by my boss at the House of Commons, his first piece of feedback was, there’s not many numbers in it. Because, yeah, I had tried to do the same thing, yeah, that you just described. And my first rule was kind of like, there’s not going to be any charts or tables in this. And I’m going to avoid as many numbers as I can. And I’m going to write the numbers out, like, in full.
MADELEINE
Well, you obviously took on board that point,
GEORGINA
just to not put people off because I think that’s, yeah, you’re absolutely right from my experience as well, that people just glaze over a bit when there’s too many numbers, myself included, I think everybody included, yeah.
MADELEINE
Even I glaze over, yeah, if I hear stuff on the news, by the time you get to the third number, it’s just really difficult to hold them in your head.
GEORGINA
Yeah, brains just fried. Yeah. So any time that you can describe it in terms of here’s the pattern, here’s a trend, give them a kind of like visual image of what the change might look like rather than just say, oh, it went up by 79 % because yeah, I think that makes sense. So you’re also completely trusted by the media establishment, which I would think is probably quite a rare thing.
MADELEINE
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
GEORGINA
From that experience of working so extensively with journalists, what advice would you give to people in the journalism industry who want to use and understand migration data?
MADELEINE
Well, that’s very kind of you to say. I think in terms of advice, think, mean, just as the first step, I suppose the key thing is just to make sure that you understand precisely what is being measured, because sometimes often the numbers sort of more or less do what they say on the tin. But sometimes it’s important to know, you know, there are particular groups that are excluded or there are particular times when someone makes, you know, pings in an administrative data set and other people won’t be included in that.
But I think in terms of the communication of it to the public, probably the biggest single thing is being able to explain whether a number is big or not. This is what the Radio 4 program, more or less, you this is one of the things, is it a big number, is what they always ask, which I think is exactly the right question. And because we often, notice a lot in media coverage, numbers are sort of sprinkled in for decoration, but without necessarily a lot of guidance about whether they’re meaningful or not. So for example, if you look at data on small boats, you you’ll have a story and it will say, okay, well, 200 people arrived yesterday or no people arrived for the last seven days, which is fine. But does it actually tell us anything about what’s going on with the small boats phenomenon? Not really, because you need a longer time period for that. need really to understand, okay, over the last three to six months, the numbers have been on an upward trajectory or in a downward trajectory or whatever it is.
So I think thinking about how do we put this number in context, is it big or small compared to what we saw in the past? Is it big or small compared to what we see in other countries? Those types of things I think really help people understand whether the number is something that they should actually care about or not.
GEORGINA
Good advice for journalists there. And my final question to you, Madeline, is what’s your proudest achievement or proudest moment with the Migration Observatory?
MADELEINE
That’s a wonderful, wonderful softball question to to end with. Thank you. I mean, I think I would say that probably the the most important achievement has been gaining respect across the political spectrum, which took the team quite a lot of work, I think, really to interrogate how data presented, what different people need to know and how to remove any whiff of policy recommendations from the presentation of the data and the evidence. In terms of a single moment, probably when we won the Economic and Social Research Council’s Impact on Society prize in 2017, which I remember thinking, okay, we’ve arrived, know, people think that this project is worthwhile. Anyway, that I think was a big deal for us at the time.
GEORGINA
The same year as your MBE.
MADELEINE
Yes, I have no idea if there’s any connection or not.
GEORGINA
May well be, who knows. Madeleine, thank you so much for talking to me today. My guest this week was Madeleine Sumption, Director of Oxford’s Migration Observatory.
Originally published on Substack: https://georginasturge.substack.com/p/podcast-episode-madeleine-sumption