Chapter 5: Public service and social impacts
Table 5.1: Estimated impact of a Tier 1 or Tier 2 migrant’s travel in the UK (£ per migrant per year, 2009/10 prices)
Car(3) Bus Rail Underground
Marginal impact of a Tier 1 or Tier 2 migrant (£ per migrant per year, 2009/10 prices) Assuming 0 per cent Assuming 100 per cent (1) displacement rate displacement rate(2) -2,368(3) -1,767(3) 76 109 40
52 50 35
Notes: The monetary values reported are only approximations and are based on a wide range of assumptions that are not likely to be precise in reality. The estimates reported may be useful to policymakers in as far as they may provide an order of magnitude of the impacts of migration across various modes of transport. They are subject to considerable ranges of uncertainty. (1) A displacement rate of 0 per cent assumes that all jobs filled by Tier 1 and Tier 2 migrants are additional jobs in the UK economy that would not exist in the absence of migration. (2) A displacement rate of 100 per cent assumes that all jobs filled by Tier 1 and Tier 2 migrants would be filled by UK-born workers in the absence of migration. (3) Unlike the estimated marginal impact of a Tier 1 or Tier 2 migrant‟s consumption of bus, rail and underground services presented in this table, the estimated marginal impact of car consumption takes into account the cost of congestion. It was not possible for Tsang and Rohr (2011) to account for the cost of congestion of the public transport network when producing their estimates. This may explain, at least in part, why the estimated marginal impact of car use varies considerably from the estimated marginal impact of the use of the public transport network. As a result of this methodological difference, the estimated marginal impact of car use is not directly comparable to the other estimates, and should not be treated as such. Source: Tsang and Rohr (2011).
5.24
Ignoring the exact values of the monetary estimates, the results in Table 5.1 suggest that Tier 1 and Tier 2 migrants have a negative impact on the road network through their use of cars. This impact is less negative than the impact of the average UK-born individual (not shown in Table 5.1) due to the lower propensity of migrants to travel by car, at least initially. Their impact on bus, rail and underground services is estimated to be slightly positive. However, as discussed above, these estimates have been calculated primarily on migrants‟ payment of fares and consumption of subsidies. They do not represent a full quantification of all impacts
because, for example, it is not possible to quantify the impact of migration on the congestion of public transport networks for all modes of transport. 5.25
A key factor in measuring the impact of migration on transport services is the capacity and / or willingness to increase the provision of those services in response to an increase in demand. For some services, such as buses, it may be possible to increase supply relatively quickly and cheaply. For others, such as rail and underground services, and the provision of roads for car use, changes in supply may occur much more slowly and at considerably greater expense.
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