FOI ref: FOI-2024-2049
You asked
I am writing to you about your Long-term international immigration, emigration and net migration flows dataset.
This includes data on the total number of emigrants but no breakdown of emigrants by nationality.
Could you please tell me the number of emigrants from Britain in the year ending December 2023 broken down by nationality?
We said
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request about the number of emigrants from Britain broken down by nationality.
On 23 November ONS released Long-term international immigration, emigration and net migration flows, provisional. Table 1 shows Long-term international migration into and out of the United Kingdom by nationality including 2018 - 2023. Estimates are generated for British, EU and non-EU nationals. However, unfortunately we do not hold full breakdowns by nationality.
Our previously published estimates of migration based on the International Passenger Survey (IPS) did include breakdowns by nationality.
Traditionally, the IPS was the main source for estimating international migration to and from the UK. However, we had long acknowledged that the IPS had been stretched beyond its original purpose and that we needed to consider all available sources to understand international migration.
In March 2020, the IPS was suspended because of the onset of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In response, we have accelerated our work to transform how migration is measured and are moving towards producing administrative data-based migration estimates, supported by statistical modelling. While the IPS resumed operation in January 2021, the decision was taken and announced in the August 2020 Migration Statistics Quarterly Report (MSQR) that going forward we would continue to focus on developing methods for measuring international migration using administrative data and statistical modelling, given the limitations of the IPS.
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