Is it in the public interest to know Bulgarian/Romanian migration estimates?

Perhaps in a few years just another 'bigoted woman' will be asking where are they are all flocking from... again... and the answer, that time, may be Romania and Bulgaria. 

There is mounting media speculation and interest in the accession of Eastern European states which took place in 2004 - which lead to a large influx of Polish and other migrants to the UK - being repeated in 2014. The influx was of course famous and famously resented because the UK, under Tony Blair, did not impose restrictions on the numbers of migrants permitted to enter the UK per year, nor on their ability to seek UK employment, unlike many other states. It is now estimated around 500,000 Polish migrants settled in the UK between 2001 and 2011.

At the time the accession treaty was being considered, when ministers were weighing up what controls would be right for the UK, estimates provided by Home Office civil servants speculated that around 13,000 migrants would come to the UK each year. It ended up being more like 270,000, so they were wrong by a factor of over 2,000%. Whoops (to be fair, if you read the linked report, you'll see they were fairly cautious about providing an estimate as they didn't believe they had good enough data to carry out the analysis... but still....).

This time around, with the impending lifting of migration controls on Bulgaria and Romania as a result of the 2005 Treaty of Accession, there are probably a few once-bitten-twice-shy civil servants who recall those past events of Polish migration - it goes without saying that the Tories will not want to take the same political flak over this as Labour have. 

So, whilst we have heard a lot of people getting hot and bothered about the possibility of this repeat, nobody this time in Government is willing to put a number on how many will arrive on the UK's shores. 

In fact, we know that the Home Office has looked at the impact of the expansion. When first asked to release the reporrt, the Home Office said there 'are no numbers in it', and that 'no report with numbers has ever existed and we won't be commissioning one' (imagine a carrot cake but without carrots...).

But now the situation has changed, and it is being claimed that it won't be helpful to release the information. Both SoS for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, and immigration minister Mark Harper are taking this line. Indeed, when subject to an FoI by the New Statesman, the response said that they (Home Office ministers presumably...although strictly speaking officers should be judging this...) needed time to assess whether it was in the public interest to release the information. This ability of the Government to withhold information for which there is clearly massive public interest is fascinating. 

If a newspaper managed to get hold of this information via leaking, and then published it, presumably the Government would - in keeping with its defence of the actions of the press following the Leveson inquiry - be quite comfortable with the press publishing it, so long as it sold papers (the sole assessment editors feel is justified when considering public interest). 

It is strange, that the Government has in law a public interest test which it applies to its own work, and yet feels ready to defend an utterly different method of assessing the public interest when it is in the hands of another body. 

Which brings us to the question, just what is the public interest? is there a common definition, and who has the right to apply it? Because if the Government is so gung-ho as it claims to be about press freedom, then so long as an editor wants information which he/she believes should be published, then it would have to grant access to that information, to be in keeping with it's assertion that the press is the best assessor of public interest in the context of information release. 

If that is not the case, then we have surely come to some kind of Platonic impasse, where principle is abandoned in favour of circumstance. The circumstance that prevents the application of the principle in this case is that the Government holds the control of the information, so in this instance is able to abandon the pretence of their principle that the press can and should freely be able to assess public interest. It seems perfectly clear, if the press obtained this information, and released it, the Government would not go after the press for wrongly obtaining the information, but would rather go into debate about the meaning of the information and its accuracy.

This is a bizarre situation, and shows how the law can be a confusing beast, more so when ministers are ideologically wedded to concepts except when it doesn't suit them.