The problem with Robert Jenrick’s migrant sex crime claims

The shadow justice secretary is spouting statistics that simply don’t add up.

In a video shared widely on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook in April, the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick referred to data on sexual offences, which he claimed show “Afghans and Eritreans are more than 20 times more likely to be convicted of sexual offences than British citizens” and overall, “foreign nationals were 71 per cent more likely than Britons to be convicted for sex crimes”.

These stats have been repeated in the Telegraph, and by the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and one of the party’s MPs Sarah Pochin. The suggestion is clear: drawing a link between migration and crime.

Adding to the picture is Jenrick’s latest claim that in London, “40 per cent last year of all of the sexual crimes were committed by foreign nationals, despite the fact that they only make up 25 per cent of the population”.

All these claims have been repeated lately amid calls for police to be more transparent about ethnicity and immigration status when someone is charged for a sexual offence. Farage accused Warwickshire Police of a “cover-up” for not revealing that two Afghan asylum seekers were charged in connection with the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton. The force said national guidance did not include “sharing ethnicity or immigration status”. Keir Starmer and his Home Secretary Yvette Cooper have also called for more transparency. Amid other cases of sexual assault involving asylum seekers, this issue is rising up the political agenda. It is ironic, then, that those citing these stats are not being fully transparent themselves.

Let’s take that 40 per cent figure. Firstly, these are not crimes committed; they are charges or cautions. If you look at the number of people serving sentences for sexual offence convictions in England and Wales, the proportion of foreign nationals is actually slightly smaller than their population share, according to the BBC’s head of statistics, Robert Cuffe. Secondly, this stat doesn’t account for age. Younger men are more likely to be charged for such offences, and foreign nationals are on average younger than British nationals.

The stats breaking down sexual offences by nationality are even shakier. Again, they don’t reflect age (or gender) – therefore fail to reflect how much more likely young male populations are to commit such crimes than the national average. Making per capita rate calculations from this data is also inappropriate because it doesn’t account for repeat offenders.

These stats also don’t factor in that population surveys underestimate the number of foreign nationals. Migration statistics do not come from an actual count of people; they are estimates. In the case of such small sub-groups of foreign nationals, such as Afghans and Eritreans, even missing a small number of people from the overall population count can result in a dramatically different picture from reality when you’re calculating per-10,000 conviction rates.

Police National Computer (PNC) data is the basis for Jenrick’s figures on sexual offence-by-nationality – this is recorded on an outdated IT system developed in the 1970s and vulnerable to human error. It is considered within government as “not reliable for nationality”. The nationality fields are not definitive: they don’t specify when people are dual nationals, nationality can be inaccurately recorded, and when “unknown” is written in the field it shouldn’t be assumed to mean a foreign national, officials warn.

Politicians across parties, from Jenrick to the Home Office minister Angela Eagle, agree that the UK does not have good enough data on ethnicity and crime. There are also calls for greater transparency across the political spectrum. One step towards transparency is to stop using what patchy data we do have in a misleading way.