[fidgewidge]

Paint me ultra skeptical about all such claims. It might be true or it might not. The error bars on these metrics should be enormous but none are given. In reality the British government has absolutely no idea about even far more basic stats like the size of the population, and calculation of things like GDP/capita and productivity are all heavily influenced by errors in that sort of base figure. Official population estimates are massive under-estimates and there's now lots of evidence that this is true.

Until about 2020/2021 a lot of the case for this had to be built on things like mismatches between expected electricity/water consumption and population claims, but since Brexit and the vaccine rollouts there is now far clearer evidence.

For Brexit, the government claimed there were 3.7 million people from other EU countries living in the UK and the actual number who came forward to apply for residence was 2 million more than that.

COVID made the problem even clearer. In some age groups more people came forward to be vaccinated than theoretically existed in the country at all. The government claims 9% of the population is unvaccinated but an opinion poll run by the BBC yielded 25%, a likely more accurate figure. The ONS recently had to admit in writing that their vaccine effectiveness numbers were meaningless garbage (and always have been) because if you take them at face value, vaccines are magical elixirs of invulnerability that make you much less likely to die for any reason at all including things that aren't health related, like workplace accidents. The ONS pretends it must be because they missed some confounding factor despite adjusting for some crazy number of them, in reality the explanation is simpler: because the population estimate is far too low, they think there are far fewer unvaccinated people than there really are, and thus the calculated death rate is far higher than it really is. The size of the vaccinated population is known to a higher degree of accuracy and thus the death rate in that group is actually accurate, creating this apparently nonsensical effect.

After 10 years they tried to do a new census, but did it in the middle of lockdowns and the resulting figures were massively out of line with other known figures:

https://www.cityam.com/census-2022-london-population-funding...

"CLF, a group of 12 local authorities, stressed that the figures were “skewed”, with Westminster missing 30,000 residents (15 per cent of the population.)"

So the chance to repair the data was flunked. Although the ONS is in denial, in the past the government has taken some steps towards admitting this. The official population size was downgraded to "experimental" (lol) and could no longer be classified as "national statistics".

A government that can't even count how many people exist on an island is in no position to accurately measure the output or productivity of those people, a far more subjective and complex set of statistics to compute. In reality nobody knows how the British economy is doing. At best they can measure a subset of it.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> For Brexit, the government claimed there were 3.7 million people from other EU countries living in the UK and the actual number who came forward to apply for residence was 2 million more than that.

Source seems to be this https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2021/07/02/are-there-really-6m-eu-ci... , and it notes quite clearly that "EUSS data should not be used as an indicator for how many EU nationals are living here. "

[fidgewidge]

In the opinion of the ONS, who are the ones who were publishing the bad figures originally? They're the people being criticized for generating garbage statistics in the first place, of course they're going to claim there's no real problem, so you'd have to test their reasoning.

Their attempt at justifying this bizarre claim is that maybe 2 million people applied to live permanently in the UK but don't actually live there. Literally the first criteria for applying to the scheme is that you live in the UK and the purpose of applying is that you want to continue living there. This reasoning is idiotic on its face and just makes the ONS look even worse, even if we didn't already know that their population statistics were hugely inaccurate from other sources.