Opening date: 26 February 2008
Closing date: 27 May 2008
Department: Office for National Statistics
Category: General
In 2007 there were over 40 separate releases about migration and population from a range of different government departments. This volume of output generated a number of conflicting news stories and, inevitably, there was some confusion among users as to which data source to use for what purpose. Consequently, this had an impact on the perceived credibility and coherence of migration and population statistics.
This issue was among those recognised by the Interdepartmental Task Force on Migration Statistics, which made the recommendation that key information on migration and population collected across government should be brought together in one place to achieve more coherent public reporting.
More recently, a cross-Government programme of work has been proposed to accelerate wider work already taking place to improve migration and population statistics. As part of these initiatives, the cross government Migration Reporting Working Group is now 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.
Further information on this consultation can be accessed via the Downloads link on the right of this page. The document provides further information about the proposals. Responses can be submitted using the template found in Annex D.
This consultation is now closed and the deadline for comments was 27 May 2008. For more information contact:
Julie Mills
Office for National Statistics
Room 2300
Segensworth Road
Titchfield
Fareham
Hampshire
PO15 5RR
