The claim: “For every one worker from Britain that works in the EU, there are four workers from the EU that work in Britain.” - Nigel Farage, UKIP leader, speaking on BBC Question Time.



Background

The recently re-elected leader of UKIP made this claim during a heated exchange of statistics with Ken Clarke on last night's Question Time.

The Justice Secretary had just claimed that “there is a net balance” between EU citizens entering and leaving the UK.

“No Ken,” replied Mr Farage, “there is not.” Having found Mr Clarke's claim to be broadly accurate when used earlier this week by the Prime Minister, Full Fact cannot agree with this part of Mr Farage's statement.

But does it follow that his counter-claim is the one that is false?

Analysis

Not necessarily: while they may superficially have appeared to have been contradicting one another, the two politicians were using yardsticks that differed in several important ways.

Firstly, the balance Mr Clarke refers to is in the annual movement between the UK and the rest of the EU, which gives no indication of the current population distribution.

Secondly, Mr Clarke's data deals with intra-EU migration as a whole, whereas Mr Farage was referring only to working populations. Mr Clarke's figures therefore include children, pensioners and the unemployed.

Thirdly, Ken Clarke's figures simply refer to net emigration of UK citizens compared with net immigration of other EU citizens, and therefore take no account next or previous country of residence. The UK citizens leaving the country would by no means all be heading for the continent.

The two claims, therefore, are far from mutually exclusive – something that neither the Justice Secretary nor the UKIP leader appeared to fully appreciate. So can they call it a truce?

We called UKIP to enquire about the origin of their figures, but received no response. However, we have been able to track down Eurostat data which, while slightly incomplete, gives a good indication of employment by citizenship among EU countries.

The available data supports Mr Farage: the number of recorded British workers in other EU countries comes to 241,000, while the number of non-British EU citizens working in Britain is 1.074 million. For every one British worker that works in the EU, there are by these figures actually 4.46 non-British EU citizens working in Britain.

Since Mr Farage seemed to be discussing country of origin rather than nationality his measures are not quite the same as Eurostat's, which do not include naturalised workers in countries other that of their birth.

But since we have not been able to find data which reflects Mr Farage's claim exactly, it seems fair to conclude that Mr Farage is essentially backed up by the figures on offer.



Conclusion

While the net migration of UK and EU citizens to and from the UK does roughly balance out, there continue to be many more UK workers in other EU countries than vice versa.

To this fact check, then, a happy ending. Mr Clarke and Mr Farage can shake hands and call it quits: they are both right.





Edgar Gerrard Hughes