Internal and cross-border migration in the United Kingdom: harmonising, estimating and analysing a decade of flow data

Migration is a process which is difficult to measure accurately due to an absence of any mandatory system for registering a move to, from or within the United Kingdom (UK). This problem is exacerbated by inconsistency in statistical reporting, as three national statistics agencies produce migration statistics for the four countries of the UK: the Office for National Statistics in England and Wales, the National Records of Scotland and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. They draw upon different data sources, use different estimation methods and produce different outputs. What results is a data landscape which is not consistent and is missing some key information, notably migration where a person moves between local authorities which are located in different UK countries.
This thesis makes the case for a consistent methodology to be employed in estimating migration in the UK. A key contribution is made through the harmonisation of available data and the use of an iterative proportional fitting method to estimate the missing flow data. The resulting output is a consistent UK wide dataset of migration at the local authority level for the first decade of the 21st century, disaggregated by age and sex.
Analysis of the dataset reveals a decline in the longstanding pattern of counterurbanisation which has characterised UK migration for the past 50 years, driven to a large extent by the fall in the intensity of migration from urban to rural areas. Net migration gain in the north from the south is reversed mid-decade, owing largely to an increase in moves from urban north to urban south. Internal migration rates are highest in 2006/07 at the peak of the economic boom, then decline as the financial crisis takes hold. The distance that people migrate falls between 2001/02 and 2010/11.