Charlotte McDonald
speaker
483 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2012
last heard 11 Jun
Charlotte McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So Thames Waters Consultants, Edge Analytics, had to make various assumptions to get a number for London.
Well, the Pew Research Centre estimated that there were about a million irregular migrants in the UK back in 2017, plus or minus a couple of hundred thousand.
They derived that estimate using something called the residual method.
That's where you take the official statistic for the number of migrants in a country's population, in this case, the number of non-EU nationals.
Then, using official data still, you remove all the people you know have a legal right to be in the country.
So...
people with visas to study and to work, then those with residency rights in the country.
And then once you've removed all the people with the right to be in the country, the number you have left, the residual, is the amount they believe is the irregular migrant population.
But the key thing with this method is you must make sure you subtract all the relevant groups if you want to end up with the right answer.
And we're not sure they did.
Well, one of the biggest criticisms of the Pew research is that they missed out a large group of people who have the right to be in the UK legally.
We think Pew got their numbers from the UK submission to the EU Statistical Office, Eurostat.
And because the UK doesn't have a formal population registration system, unlike many EU countries, the UK's numbers weren't easy to interpret.
They included people with visas, but not foreign nationals with something called Leave to Remain.
Yeah, and we're not sure that's what Pew did, but several experts think that's what happened.
And we've invited Pew to tell us otherwise if they wish, and they haven't so far.
Well, yeah, but we don't know how big.
The Windrush scandal is a reminder that the Home Office record-keeping hasn't always been great.
We think that since 2004, over 860,000 people have been granted leave to remain.
And we know that at least 280,000 have not gone on to claim citizenship.
Showing 201–220 of 483 · page 11 of 25
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