May has been very generous to EU nationals, but who will pay the bill?

A rapidly rising population is squeezing housing, health and schools – this offer will make things worse

Theresa May’s offer to confirm the settled status of an estimated 3.2 million EU citizens living in the UK is certainly “generous”, as the Prime Minister told the Commons on Monday. More so, indeed, than may be appreciated. It includes access to benefits and extends to the relatives of European nationals already here – parents, siblings, even cousins in some cases. Most people accept this as fair and expect the EU countries where 1.2 million British ex-pats live to respond in kind.

But the two groups are not compatible. Around one third of the Brits in Europe are self-sufficient retirees mainly living in France, Spain and Ireland. It is thought that about 800,000 are workers with families. By contrast, most EU nationals in the UK are in jobs and many are here with dependants. As they are older on average, the British abroad are more likely to be users of the health services but EU countries charge the NHS for treating them – about £580 million in 2014. The UK received just £12 million from other EU countries for the treatment of their pensioners, suggesting there are far fewer of them.

On the other hand, UK nationals on the continent are far less likely than their EU counterparts in Britain to be consumers of other public services like schools or transport. Moreover, since they are spread around a number of countries, their impact is dissipated. Here, there are at least 2.1 million EU nationals in work, which suggests a million or so are dependants, mainly school-age children.

In seeking reciprocal guarantees from the EU for Brits after Brexit, we are not really comparing like with like. The final agreement should consider the impact on our public services of such a large influx of people. When it comes to settling the “bill” for leaving, this should be taken into account, but almost certainly won’t be.

Of course not all, maybe not even most, of the EU nationals now living here will want to settle, whatever the eventual deal to underpin their rights. If they do, and avail themselves of the invitation to bring in their relatives, Mrs May can kiss goodbye yet again to her pledge to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands”. It simply won’t happen, not least because non-eu immigration is running at record levels as well.

Anyone who thinks none of this matters or is the obsession of pettyminded little Englanders should look at the latest UK population statistics published a few days ago. They showed the total for the UK now stands at 65.6 million and rose by more than 500,000 in the past 12 months. This is such a startling figure that it should have dominated the news but with so much else going on it passed with little comment. It is, after all, just 11 years since the population passed the 60 million mark. The current rate of increase is the fastest since the post-war baby boom, yet this time it is principally the result of immigration combined with increased longevity.

The big difference between now and the post-war era, however, is that then we prepared for a rise in population whereas this time we didn’t. Almost all the difficulties that the Government faces – housing shortages, a squeeze on health and education budgets, soaring care costs, crowded transport, overflowing prisons – are the consequence of a rapidly rising population for which no provision was made.

And the reason it wasn’t planned for was because no one saw it coming or refused to acknowledge that it was happening. The first time I became aware there was something seriously amiss was 15 years ago this summer when I was contacted by a former diplomat, Sir Andrew (now Lord) Green, who had just set up Migration Watch UK. The story he told based on research by the Oxford demographer David Coleman seemed scarcely credible: over the next decade immigration would add 2 million to the population and politicians had to take the implications seriously.

Needless to say they didn’t. In fact to begin with they denounced Green and his organisation for scaremongering and the findings were largely ignored. As it turned out, the Migration Watch predictions were far too low. What they did not bargain for was the massive increase in EU immigration following the accession of the East European countries to the EU in 2004.

When Migration Watch was set up the population of the UK was 58 million; today it is 7 million higher – and that’s without counting an unknown number of illegal entrants. At this rate it will be over 70 million by 2025.

The people who ignored this trend 15 years ago and denounced anyone who discussed it as racist are the same people who today demand that more money is spent on the public services to sustain such a large population. It is true that working immigrants contribute to the taxes required to fund the necessary services and that rising populations tend to boost GDP, though not always on a per capita basis. It is also true that overseas nurses, doctors, teachers and other professionals help support the services the growing population needs.

But it is not enough; and in any case the extra hospitals, schools, doctors surgeries and the like have not been provided which is why there is so much pressure on those we have. Until the mid-1990s, the actuarial assumptions that underpinned government forecasts of future public service requirements assumed an almost steady population. They knew more homes would be needed because of the break-up of families, but they vastly underestimated the rate of new household formation because immigration was not taken into account.

When the Common Market was established 60 years ago, with free movement one of its core principles, it was never envisaged that millions of people would move to one European country and settle there. At the time, when most of eastern Europe was under Communist rule, it was not even possible. In the end, it was not the fact of immigration that led to the Brexit vote, but its sheer scale for which our politicians, to their eternal shame, never prepared.

So we may well have made a generous offer to enable EU nationals to stay here; but how we will pay for it is anyone’s guess. Waiving a large chunk of the exit bill would be a start.