James Fransham

Good time to plug @fransham.bsky.social's Starmer tracker: www.economist.com/interactive/...

Keir Starmer isn't just unpopular because of his presentation. He also hasn't made any progress on voters' priorities

Another U-turn from Britain’s government This time over property taxes

Last week there was a storm brewing over pubs' rising business-rates bills. The the government is due to announce the details of its U-turn in the "coming days". My piece crunches the numbers on how much tax relief will cost the government (and ultimately you).
www.economist.com/britain/2026...

This week's work: a pithy little note on the lacklustre Labour government.
www.economist.com/britain/2026...

Why Britain has fallen behind on road safety More than 1,600 people still die each year in road collisions

The UK government published a new road safety strategy today (the first since 2011). Road deaths are now a third higher per mile travelled than in Sweden. Here's a piece I wrote in the depth of last winter about how to reduce deaths:

www.economist.com/britain/2025...

What if the flu were treated more like covid, not the other way round? A post-pandemic thought experiment

There's a lot of flu around the UK at the moment; and lots of Christmases will be ruined for it. What if we adopted some of the preventative measures such as at-home testing, monitoring and mitigation that we did during covid? My piece from 2022 explored this: www.economist.com/britain/2022...

Trivia Q: when was the last time that a British governing party was polling in third place?
www.economist.com/interactive/...

Are Brits really leaving the country in droves? No. We estimate that emigration is lower now than it was five years ago

21. We used the middle chart in the piece. I don't have a strong view on the overall level itself: it's the change that's gotten people's goats. Whichever view you take, emigration of British citizens is lower now than it was five years ago. Read the full piece:
www.economist.com/britain/2025...

20. 16. I produced three possible levels for the emigration flows:
a) The raw flows in the spreadie above
b) Flows "anchored" to the central estimate of the RAPID-based method (257K in 2024)
c) Flows "anchored" to the lower estimate of the RAPID-based method (220K in 2024)

19. Finally, putting this all together, you get a data table that looks like this. But wait a minute, doesn't the ONS RAPID-based estimate suggest that emigration is more like 250,000?!

18. I've used this share of the stock from the UN as the assumption about the flow of British citizens' emigration patterns of non-OECD countries. With that RoW emigration starts low at around 10% and rises gradually through to 2024. This is very finger in the wind, but defensible.

17. According to the UN there were 4.8m Brits abroad in 2024, up from 4.7m in 2020. Only 16% of these people were living in non-OECD countries. Though, to be fair to the Dubai boosters, the share of Brits living in non-OECD nations has risen from 10% to 16% over the past 24 years.

16. What about the rest of the world? There are another 160 possible destinations that Brits could be moving to. Isn't everyone just flocking to Dubai? The Emirati embassy did not disclose any information to me. But the UN produces a database on stocks of migrants.
www.un.org/development/...

15. Aggregating all the OECD data together you get this. No sign of mass exodus from the UK by British nationals, here.

14. ...
b) The data definitions are inconsistent. Sometimes its acquisition of nationality, rather than long-term visa-based immigration, etc. But it's the best there is. Here's the meta data for Australia.

13. The main shortcoming with the data is:
a) It is gappy in parts -- for example, no data for France from 2004 to 2012. I made estimates for France, Turkey and Poland using a simple linear regression of the flows observed in other countries.

12. For the purposes of my article, I split the OECD data into three groups:
EU nations: 17 countries from 2004 to 2023 covering 89% of EU population in 2023.
Anglosphere: Australia Canada, New Zealand & USA
Other OECD: Swiz, Israel, Iceland, Japan, Korea, Mex, Norway & Turkey.

11. So, is it possible to paint a more accurate picture of British emigration over the past decade? Let's have a look at the database of OECD immigration flows data. It's a decent source, covering about 30-33 of 38 OECD countries each year.
data-viewer.oecd.org?chartId=74a6...

10. Note also, the RAPID confidence intervals below show emigration is probably somewhere between 220,000 and 300,000.

9. The ONS view is that the IPS method was "stretched beyond its original purpose". While the level of emigration is too low—as demonstrated by the Census-based adjustment—the trend over the past three years is broadly consistent with the new RAPID-based estimates (see chart below).

8. Using data published by the ONS prior to the Census adjustment, and more recent IPS data (since 2021), you get the following trend. Simply put: looking at emigration of British citizens on a consistent basis for the past decade, emigration is lower today, not higher.

7. The published IPS-based estimates shown in the chart in point 3 are adjusted for the Census. What does the non-Census adjusted IPS data look like, you ask?

6. But that would probably undermine the veracity of the data exercise as they may not agree with the Census-adjusted IPS estimates. And these methods may well be adjusted in the future, too, as explained by the ONS advisory panel:

5. What we want, folks, is to look at emigration on a consistent-methodology basis. The ONS have only published RAPID-based estimates from 2021 onwards. They could, in theory, produce estimates for earlier years because, as they explain below, they do have access to the data from 2008 onwards.

4. The ONS don't know what the true picture of emigration prior to 2021. They adjusted the IPS to match estimated flows observed in Census data; and made adjustments for migration to Scotland & N. Ire. But they don't know when this emigration occurred, as explained by the ONS here:

3. The ONS recently introduced a new method to capture the migration of UK citizens: switching from IPS to a "RAPID" method based on interactions with the tax and benefit system. You can see this discrepancy here. That doesn't mean emigration is rising. There's simply a discontinuity in the data.

Emigration of British citizens is lower now that it was five years ago

2. There was little space to get into the underlying thesis and methodology behind this chart, so want to expand on it in a thread here.

Are Brits really leaving the country in droves? No. We estimate that emigration is lower now than it was five years ago

In this week's Economist I've written about how, contrary to the breathless hot-takes last week, the emigration of British citizens from the UK is actually falling. (A thread 1/17)
www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Rachel maxed-out the mudslinging on Wednesday 🙈

www.economist.com/britain/2025...

Totally agree. Impressively speedy work, too, I might add.

Britain’s council tax is arbitrary, regressive and needs fixing Based on estimated house values 33 years ago, it is not fit for purpose

In light of today's new mansion tax, re-upping my piece from last year on council tax. Why Buckingham Palace, valued at around £1bn, pays less tax than an average three-bedroom semi in Blackpool:
www.economist.com/britain/2024...