About This Site
What it is, where the numbers come from, and what to do when one of them is wrongWhere the figures come from
Everything on the site is drawn from official statistics. The main sources are the Home Office Immigration System Statistics quarterly release and its migration transparency data, Ministry of Justice offender management and tribunals statistics, ONS migration and population estimates, DWP benefits data, MHCLG housing data and Eurostat for European comparisons. Secondary analysis from the National Audit Office, the House of Commons Library and the Migration Observatory is used for context and is labelled as such.
Each page names the specific source table, for example Ret_01 for
returns or Asy_D11 for asylum support, and the period it covers.
The methodology page sets out the definitions in
full, including the distinction between enforced and voluntary returns and why
port refusals are always reported as a separate series.
How often it updates
Official statistics are published on gov.uk at 9:30am. The dashboards here are refreshed against the new detailed datasets the same morning, and every figure is reconciled against the publisher's own summary tables before anything goes live. Small boat crossings update daily from the Home Office operational feed; the news digest and release calendar update weekly.
The release calendar lists what is coming and when. Release-day briefings record what each release said on the morning it landed, and are not rewritten afterwards.
Being wrong, and saying so
Two different things can change a number here, and they are kept apart.
| What happened | Where it is recorded |
|---|---|
| The publisher restated its own figure, which happens routinely because recent periods are provisional | Revisions ledger — 5 recorded |
| We published something wrong | Corrections log |
Conflating the two would be a way of blaming the Home Office for our own mistakes, so movements are classified before they are published and anything unclassified is withheld. If you think a figure is wrong, email contact@deported.co.uk with the page and the number; because every figure names its source table, most disagreements can be settled against the publisher directly.
Using the data
The underlying statistics are Crown copyright, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and the extracts here are free to reuse on the same terms with attribution to Deported.co.uk. 33 datasets are downloadable as JSON and CSV, every chart has a PNG, CSV and embed option, and story packs bundle print-resolution charts and sourced key figures by topic for journalists.
For machines: every page has a Markdown equivalent at the same path (for example /returns.md), there is a curated index at /llms.txt, and an RSS feed carries the weekly digest and release-day briefings.
What this site is not
- Not a campaign. Figures are presented with their caveats and without a recommended conclusion. Where a comparison is commonly made but statistically unsound — dividing a point-in-time prison snapshot by an annual return flow, say — it is not made here, and the methodology page explains why.
- Not a substitute for the source. If you are citing a figure in print, cite the release it came from. Provisional figures move; the revisions ledger shows by how much.
- Not exhaustive. Some things people want are simply not published: the Home Office suspended its asylum work-in-progress series in 2024, and MoJ convictions by nationality remain unpublished. Where a figure is missing, the site says so rather than estimating.
- Not affiliated with the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice or any government department, political party or campaign group.