U.K. Population Makes Biggest Jump Since 1971 Powered by Immigration
The rise in migration will pile further pressure on the new Labour government to tighten immigration regulations.
The United Kingdom’s population jumped one percent in the year to mid-2023, its fastest pace of growth since at least 1971, driven by surging international migration.
The country’s population was estimated to have climbed to 68.3 million at mid-year 2023 compared to 67.6 million at the same time in the preceding year, the Office for National Statistics said in a statement. Deaths exceeded births by 16,300 while net international migration jumped by a whopping 677,300 in the period, the data shows.
The rise in migration will pile further pressure on the new Labour government to tighten immigration regulations as it grapples with strained public infrastructure and stretched government finances.
The increase in international migration was driven by foreign workers coming to the U.K., with 286,382 visas granted to main applicants in all work categories in the year ending June 2023. That was 11 percent less than in the previous year, but more than double that in 2019. Some 260,392 visas were issued to dependants of workers in the year, with ‘Health and Care Worker’ dependants alone accounting for 69 percent of the total.
Net migration in the U.K., the difference between the number of people coming to live for the long-term and those leaving, climbed to a record 764,000 in 2022, about three times the annual average before the pandemic. Net migration fell 10 percent in 2023 to 685,000, the Office of National Statistics has said, but was still well above pre-pandemic levels.
The previous Conservative government had said that immigration numbers will start falling once a series of measures announced in December start to take effect.
The policy changes have included scrapping dependant visas for care workers, increasing the threshold salary to qualify for a Skilled Worker visa to £38,700 from £26,200 and disallowing foreign students not involved in research to bring in dependants from January 1, 2024. All of this should help to cut net migration by about 300,000 a year.
The top five non-EU nationalities for immigration flows into the U.K. in the year ending June 2023 were India with 253,000, Nigeria with 141,000, China with 89,000, Pakistan with 55,000 and Ukraine with 35,000, ONS said previously.
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