The Office for National Statistics is conducting a public consultation into the reporting of migration and population statistics.
The volume of media output on migration and population releases was huge in 2007, and this tangle of news stories from a range of government departments inevitably created some confusion among data users as to which data source to use and for what purpose. Consequently, this had an impact on the perceived credibility and coherence of migration and population statistics.
Work is underway to solve this problem. The Interdepartmental Task Force on Migration Statistics has recommended that key information on migration and population collected across government should be brought together in one place to achieve more coherent public reporting. This is part of an initiative to accelerate wider activity already taking place to improve migration and population statistics.
The cross-government Migration Reporting Working Group is holding a 13-week public consultation on its plans to produce more timely government reporting.
As migration is an important driver of population change, it is proposed to group migration and population statistical outputs produced across government together to provide greater coherence in reporting.
This will be achieved through both co-ordinating publication dates across government in a number of step changes over time, and providing an opportunity to describe differences between the various outputs, and the reasons for these, at the time of publication.
Through grouping these publications, and providing an overview of the key messages from across the range of data published, there will be less room for confusion in the future.
Feedback is welcome from regional organisations on any issues this might raise.