Did Sunak Break Data Rules Over Asylum Staff Claim?

[Borg Refinery]

Rishi Sunak told the House of Commons on Wednesday that the government has increased the number of staff handling asylum claims by 80 per cent.
The prime minister and the home secretary Suella Braverman have faced criticism in recent days over the asylum backlog and the conditions at a migrant processing centre in Manston, Kent.
But the latest available stats don’t support Mr Sunak’s claim.
And even if he had access to some more recent information to back up the assertion, he’d be breaking government rules on data transparency by citing figures that aren’t in the public domain.

Where’s the claim from?​

The Home Office told FactCheck the claim is based on a comparison between 2019-20 – when there were 597 asylum caseworkers – and today.
The department says there are now 1,073 such officials in place. If that’s true, it would represent an 80 per cent rise.
But there’s a catch.
While we can see the 2019-20 figures on the government website, there’s no publicly available data to back up the idea that there are over a thousand working now.
The latest published data covers the financial year 2021-22, when just 614 people were employed in these roles.
That would represent a 2 per cent rise compared to 2019-20, not 80 per cent as the prime minister claims.
It’s possible that Mr Sunak has access to some internal government data that shows the numbers have since shot up. But we have no way of checking this because the statistics, if they exist, haven’t been published.

Breaking data rules?​

The UK statistics regulator is clear that politicians shouldn’t make claims about data that isn’t in the public domain.
“Whenever figures are quoted publicly by ministers or officials, the figures should be released at the same time,” wrote the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) in February 2021.
The government in which Mr Sunak served as chancellor seemed to agree. It wrote in May 2021 that it “is committed to transparency and will endeavour to publish all statistics and underlying data when referenced publicly, in line with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.”

FactCheck verdict​

Rishi Sunak says the government has increased the number of people handling asylum applications by 80 per cent. But the latest available data shows only a 2 per cent rise since 2019-20, which is his starting point for the comparison.
It’s possible Mr Sunak has access to more recent internal data to back up his claim. But if that’s the case, he’d be breaking data transparency rules by citing figures that have not been officially published.
We asked the government to show us publicly available statistics to support the prime minister’s assertion. It did not offer any.

Thoughts? Is it fair game or bad form? This is an odd one, is he abusing his position to release data only he's privy to?

 

[sear]

BR #1,
I've been criticized for topic-drift, so I may be on thin ice with this comment. Please pardon me.

Is Sunak a 1st gen. immigrant PM?
If so, perhaps that's sensitized his outlook on immigration.

"Bad form?"
If the apparent change is in response to an emergency, that emergency may explain it. Explanation and justification are not synonyms.

I love English accents. I was there for a couple of days, and they kept them up the whole time.
comedienne Paula Poundstone

 

[Borg Refinery]

Sunak has been very xenophobic just like Priti Patel was and Suella Braverman (also all 1st gen immigrants).

You're not skating on any kind of thin ice at all, not with me anyway, if anything I have tried (obviously veryunsuccessfully - my apologies) to try and put you at ease and make you feel like you can post anything you want in any of my threads. more or less.

I dunno who taht is you quoptedd but she sounds funny - we English can't even understand each other with our regional accents.

 

[Borg Refinery]

(I left the typos in for extra effect)

 

[sear]

You're not skating on any kind of thin ice at all, not with me anyway, if anything I have tried (obviously veryunsuccessfully - my apologies) to try and put you at ease and make you feel like you can post anything you want in any of my threads. more or less.

"veryunsuccessfully" BR

Exaggeration for ill-affect.
I sincerely appreciate your spirit of comity, and as you've already noted I would like to propagate it here.

I'm not contradicting your interpretation of "thin ice". BUT !! It's not what I had in mind when I posted.
Instead I was referring to the continuity thin ice in a topic "Data Rules Over Asylum" of me trying to juxtapose the differences in perspective on immigration between generations long-tenured natives, and 1st gen* immigrants.

I did this in my emphatic belief that context matters.

I dunno who taht is you quoptedd but she sounds funny - we English can't even understand each other with our regional accents.

She's a comedienne (female comedian). https://paulapoundstone.com/
And indeed, regional dialects play havoc in U.S. English as well. BUT !!
Television may be reducing regional disparities as follows. U.S. English as witnessed on U.S. television seems mainly to be a single dialect, originating from the population centers of the Atlantic & Pacific coasts. So when the evening TV news is broadcast in rural Mississippi, that's the dialect they hear.
This has not entirely snuffed out the Southern drawl. But the trend seems evident.

* In U.S. English "first generation immigrant" can either mean the generation that travels to the U.S. as immigrants, - or - their children native born in the U.S.

com·i·ty (kŏmĭ-tē) 1. An atmosphere of social harmony. [Latin cōmitās, from cōmis, friendly; see smei- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.] The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.