Thanks for downloading this edition of More or Less. This is the version from BBC Radio 4.

Here's Tim Halford.

Hello and welcome to More or Less, opening the curtains and letting the light in on

murky statistics and the lazy use of numbers. This week we commit an act of more or less

heresy by admitting that sometimes words are better than numbers. And we'll be wiping the smug

smile off the faces of these laughing rats.

But first, the census data released this week shows that the number of foreign-born

residents in England and Wales has risen by nearly three million since 2001 to seven and a half

million people. A third of these new arrivals, that's one million, are from the European countries

that have joined the EU since 2004. A few would have arrived before EU accession but most came after.

Compare this wave of immigration to the number the labour government was expecting back in 2003.

It said net migration from those countries would be between five and thirteen thousand each year.

Even if the higher figure had been right, the total number would now only be

91,000, less than a tenth of the actual figure. So how did they get it so wrong?

The estimate was based on work by researchers at University College London and the Centre for

Research and Analysis on Migration. The problem was they had very little decent data to rely on.

There were no migration figures for the ten countries who were due to join in 2004.

The team had to go on what migrants from other countries in different political and economic

circumstances had done in the past. If you look at the original report, it's loaded with

caveats. But alas, the politicians, the media and the chaturality don't do caveats.

It's the number that people remember.

The lead author was Christian Dustman. He says one of the difficulties was that migration

...