First published on the "Monk Debunks" substack, which you can subscribe to here.

They’re at it again…

If you’ve been following my work for more than a few months, you might recognise this as very similar to the Express headline from back in May: “27 young foreign workers hired for every one Brit as immigration fuels unemployment crisis”

It was, of course, a terrible use of statistics, debunked by me and the fantastic BBC More of Less programme (who gave my debunk a mention!)

So let’s see what they’ve done this time…

The Centre for Social Justice

As with last time, the headline and article follow research from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a centre-right think tank founded by Iain Duncan Smith and Tim Montgomerie in 2004.

In fact, they tortured the same data set to get the same sort of misleading research headline, this time publishing: “JUST ONE IN FIVE ADDED PAYROLL JOBS SINCE 2014 WENT TO BRITISH NATIONALS”

They used data from HMRC showing the number of payrolled positions each month, going back to 2014, which is also broken down by how many jobs are held by UK, EU and non-EU workers.

In 2014, there were 28.4 million payrolled jobs

In 2025, there were 32.1 million payrolled jobs.

This means that there were around 3.7 million more jobs in 2025 than in 2014.

And, just like in their last report, they pretended that those were the only jobs anyone was hired for during the decade. As if people aren’t leaving jobs, getting new jobs, joining the workforce, or leaving the workforce every single day.

Let’s take a look at what the data actually shows us, before going over why their portrayal is, again, wildly misleading.

The HMRC Data

We’ll start with the overall picture.

Between 2014 and 2025, there was a 3.7million increase in payrolled jobs in the UK. This data doesn’t include self-employed roles, only those on HMRC’s PAYE database.

And when you break that data down into nationality groups, this is what you get:

The number of UK nationals stays largely flat, rising overall by about 734,000 over the decade.

In the years before Brexit, you see a fairly steady level of non-EU workers, with a fairly steady higher number of EU workers. After Brexit, there is a fall in EU workers and in 2021, when we open up after Covid, non-EU workers increase significantly.

That is entirely in line with what we know about immigration levels in 2021-2025.

What you’ll hopefully also notice is that the vast majority of the jobs across the entire time period are held by UK nationals.

So how did the report and the Daily Mail end up with such a wild headline?

Misleading Assumptions

Firstly, two points to make about the data set:

• These are payrolled jobs and not workers. One worker may hold multiple payrolled jobs, and plenty of workers may be self-employed and therefore not show up in the data at all.

• Nationality is recorded at the point someone first registers for National Insurance. So it is likely an overestimate of foreign nationals, as their status doesn’t change if and when they become British citizens.

Now, onto the misleading assumptions…

The first is that they had to make a fundamentally flawed assumption to be able to claim “Just one in five additional payroll jobs created in Britain since 2014 went to British nationals”

They had to assume (or pretend) that jobs are entirely static, where the workers employed in them don’t change, and that there were only 3.7 million “new” or “additional” jobs during that time, that either “went to” a UK national or a foreign national in a binary fashion.

In reality, that 3.7 million is simply the net change in the number of payrolled jobs over a decade. Millions of new jobs will have been started, and millions will have ended.

Young people are joining the jobs market every day, older people are retiring, people are getting sick, others are returning to work, people are changing jobs, people can hold multiple jobs at once, people are moving from payrolled to self-employed and vice versa…

None of this is visible from the net change.

It is just ludicrous to suggest that the net number represents the only “new” jobs in a decade.

The second incredibly misleading use of those statistics is to suggest we know anything about who “took” the “additional” jobs.

We’ve already established they aren’t actual, identifiable jobs, but even if we accepted the assumption that they were, there is absolutely no data on who took those particular jobs.

All we know is that there were more UK nationals, EU nationals and non-EU nationals working in payrolled jobs in 2025 than in 2014. And that the increase was greater for non-EU nationals than for the UK nationals.

Which is wholly unsurprising given that the size of the working population among UK nationals is unlikely to change much over that time period, while non-EU migration rose significantly from a much lower baseline.

This is the pie chart the Daily Mail produced from the CSJ numbers, titled “Who got new jobs in Britain since 2014”:

Just look at that big scary red chunk… (sigh)

And that title will suggest to the casual reader that the pie chart is showing everyone who started a new job since 2014!

Here is a slightly less misleading visual showing how the numbers have changed, using the same data set.

The percentage of jobs being held by foreign workers has indeed increased, from 11% to 20%, but the whole pie has also increased, as has the number of payrolled jobs held by British workers.

This doesn’t point to foreigners “taking” jobs away from British people. It suggests an increase in available positions that cannot be fulfilled by British workers alone.

Repeat offenders

The Daily Mail aren’t the only ones running with these wildly misleading headlines.

• Migrants taking four in five new jobs in UK, says Centre for Social Justice (Telegraph)

• ‘Four out of five new jobs went to foreigners in the past decade,’ report finds (LBC)

• Four in five new jobs in Britain taken by migrants, damning report finds (GB News)

• Fury as four out of five new UK jobs created over past decade taken by foreign workers rather than British citizens (The Sun)

• Foreigners take 80% of all new UK jobs – Britons ‘written off’ (Express)

As I said at the start of this piece, back in May, the CSJ produced a similarly misleading report using the same data set, looking at under-25s specifically.

That was debunked at the time.

But it turns out this has been an ongoing battle between the press and those who care about misinformation for years.

In November 2015, the Daily Express published “75% of new jobs go to EU migrants in 1 year”. Jonathan Portes complained to IPSO, who wrote in their report:

The ONS figures represented net changes in employment, and not new jobs. He said that it was obviously wrong that migrants fill most new British jobs; the vast majority of people starting a new job every day in the UK are born in the UK. In 2010, for example, approximately 85% of new hires were of British-born workers. The article gave the significantly misleading impression that migrants were displacing British-born people in the workforce. Net changes in employment figures do not show any information about the proportion of job hunters who found work in a given period; they do not allow for people who leave the job market permanently; and they do not reflect that some individuals might get two jobs, or half a job. The complainant noted that the statistical bulletin which had been the source of the figures specifically stated that “the estimates of employment by both nationality and country of birth relate to the number of people in employment rather than the number of jobs. Changes in the series therefore show net changes in the number of people in employment, not the proportion of new jobs that have been filled by UK and non-UK workers.

His complaint was upheld, and the Express changed its online headline to “Number of EU migrants employed in the UK has risen by 20%”, and put the following correction at the bottom of the online article, and on page 40 of a subsequent print copy of their newspaper:

Correction

This article was amended on 22 December 2015. It originally reported “shocking figures” revealing that 3 out of 4 new jobs go to EU migrants. This is incorrect. The figures referred to, published by the Office for National Statistics, refer to net changes in employment and not to the number of people entering employment, or new jobs. The figures showed that the number of UK Nationals in employment increased by 122,000 compared to an increase of 324,000 in non-UK EU nationals.

Earlier that year, in May 2015, The Express had also written an article claiming:

The latest employment figures show David Cameron’s jobs miracle continuing with a record number of people now in work. However, it is migrants who are reaping much of the benefit, with people from overseas getting new jobs at 10 times the rate of British-born workers.

Another IPSO complaint was upheld. The phrase “with people from overseas getting new jobs at 10 times the rate of British-born workers.” was quietly removed from the online piece and another correction appeared right at the end of the piece:

Correction

In a previous version of this article we stated that the latest employment figures showed that people from overseas got new jobs at 10 times the rate of British born workers. This is incorrect. The latest figures actually showed changes in net employment, which is the number of people in employment rather than the number of jobs that are available. Net changes in employment does not show any information about the proportion of people getting new jobs in the UK. Following an IPSO ruling on a similar inaccuracy, we are happy to set out the correct position.

The Express are not the only one, but this just highlights an ongoing problem. The headlines do so much more damage than a quiet online update, or a correction on page 40, can ever undo.

So when you see an implausible headline suggesting foreign workers are getting more jobs than British workers, be on the lookout for the what part of the data they are twisting to achieve that headline. Because British workers hold the vast majority of all payrolled jobs, and that is unlikely to change drastically any time soon!

First published on the "Monk Debunks" substack, which you can subscribe to here.