[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.