Migrants fuel population boom
They will push total up to 73million... but experts warn this estimate is FAR too low
MIGRATION will add 5.6million to Britain’s soaring population over the next 25 years, according to official forecasts.
Immigration and high birth rates among foreign arrivals will account for 77 per of the projected 7.3million growth by 2041, the Office for National Statistics predicted.
But last night experts claimed the official projection may be an underestimate because it is based on an ‘extraordinarily low’ assumption of net migration.
The ONS forecasts that over the next decade the UK will become home to another 3.6million people – more than the population of Wales.
By 2041, the country will be home to 72.9million people – the equivalent of adding the populations of Scotland and Northern Ireland to numbers already living here. Within 100 years, the numbers are forecast to have reached 86million.
The ONS said that Britain’s population would grow at a significantly higher rate than the EU average.
The ONS projected that net migration – the difference between those arriving in and leaving the UK – would be 165,000 a year. But over the past decade it has actually averaged 250,000 annually.
And the ONS projections do not cover illegal immigration into Britain.
Earlier this month a former Home Office chief – David Wood, head of immigration enforcement until 2015 – admitted that Britain was home to more than a million illegal immigrants.
Yesterday’s ONS figures raised fresh questions about how the country would cope with such a dramatic population expansion when housing, schools and hospitals were already overstretched.
Lord Green, chairman of the Migration-Watch think-tank, said: ‘Given that net migration has averaged about 250,000 a year over the last ten years, the immigration assumption of 165,000 underlying the principal projection is extraordinarily low.
‘This is serious because it will lead to inadequate planning for housing, schools, hospitals and infrastructure – as, indeed, we have seen in recent years. Yet again the ONS have been much too cautious.’
He said that if net migration continued at around 250,000 – the ONS ‘high’ migration assumption – the UK population would grow by almost 10million over 25 years. It would mean 82 per cent was down to immigration – an additional 8million people.
Campaign group Population Matters said: ‘The population of the UK is unsustainable today. These figures show that our environment, our infrastructure and our public services face unbearable pressure over coming decades. The absolute numbers are frightening enough but the underlying trend is even more alarming. It beggars belief that in the face of such an astronomical increase, there is simply no planning or policy response from the Government.
‘We must not accept that endless population growth is inevitable and that policy on demography should be an endless series of increasingly tortuous improvisations and knee-jerk reactions. It is time to stop being squeamish about population.’
According to the ONS, the UK’s population will exceed 70million before the end of the next decade. The population stood at 65.6million in 2016.
However, statisticians said that the projections indicated a slower increase that the previous figures published two years ago. At that time, they suggested that the UK population would reach 70million by 2027 – two years earlier than the new projection.
The difference is because of lower assumptions on future levels of fertility and international migration as well as a slowdown in the increase in life expectancy. The ONS based its estimates on annual net migration falling rapidly to only 165,000 annually. That is some way below the current level of 246,000 recorded in the year to March.
Overall, the country’s population will grow by 11 per cent by 2041, compared with the 4 per cent EU average, 10 per cent for France and 4 per cent for Germany. The UK’s growth is also forecast to be much faster than China’s predicted 1 per cent increase.
The projections, published every two years, are now for a 3.6million – or 5.5 per cent – increase over the ten years to 2026.
More than half – 54 per cent – will be attributed to the arrival of migrants after 2016. The rest of the rise is accounted for by the gap between births and deaths.
The ONS study said: ‘Once the indirect effect is taken into account, international migration accounts for 77 per cent of the projected UK population growth between mid-2016 and mid-2041.
‘Because migrants are concentrated at young adult ages, the impact of migration on the projected number of women of childbearing age is especially important over this period.’
It added: ‘International migration to and from the UK before the projection base of 2016 will also influence future population growth, in the sense that past migrants and their descendants will contribute to the projected numbers of birth and deaths.’
Over the past 25 years, the population has grown by 8.2million (14.3 per cent) while over the next quarter of a century it is projected to grow by 7.3 million (11.1 per cent). The figures take no account of the UK’s decision to leave the EU.
Andrew Nash, of the ONS Population Projections Unit, said the expected number of children born to each woman had been cut from 1.89 to 1.84, while growth in life expectancy was trimmed for men from 84.3 to 83.4 and for women from 87.1 to 86.2.
The number of people aged over 85 living in Britain will double within 25 years, according to the ONS. The figure will increase from 1.6million last year to 3.2million in 2041.
‘Unbearable pressure on public services’