The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has released its latest national population projections. It estimates that, between mid-2022 and mid-2032, the population will rise by 4.9 million to a high of 72.5m, overtaking France. These projections presume both that a decline in fertility and medical improvements to life expectancy through medicine will continue.
The increase in the size of the population, therefore, will be driven by mass immigration, with births and deaths at 6.8m each, effectively cancelling each other out. The ONS projects that 10m people will immigrate long term to Britain, while around 5m will emigrate.
This is based on the assumption that net international migration will decline until mid-2028, at which point it will remain at 340,000 annually as a long-term average.
However, in the year ending June 2023, net migration was 906,000. In the year ending June 2024 it was 728,000. Getting that down to 340,000 would require major policy shifts, which the current Government hasn’t indicated it is interested in.
The recent high levels of immigration make this even harder, because it will mean higher levels of family migration in the years to come and because the care worker visa allows them to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) after five years.
In fact, this figure of 340,000 is derived from the average of the previous ten years of net migration, so it is almost certainly an under-projection. Post-2021, there has been a shift in the composition of migrants, away from migrants from the European Economic Area (EEA) to non-EEA, with the latter more likely to not return home. As such, we should expect immigration to stay high; yet even a level of 340,000 would still mean net migration was higher than in any year before 2021.
England’s population is projected to grow faster than Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, driven by the majority of immigrants moving there. From prior experience, we know that migrants will also be attracted mainly to the cities, exacerbating the housing crisis.
In this same period from 2022-2032, the number of people at state pension age will increase from 12m to 13.7m, a 13.8% increase, even with the planned increase of the state pension age for both sexes to 67.
With the fastest growing age group being pensioners, the ratio of workers to dependants will keep increasing, meaning that greater spending will be required, with that tax burden falling on a smaller proportion of workers. This is also true at a local level, with the number of over-85s nearly doubling from 2022 to 2047. That means a higher social care bill, even as councils are struggling to meet the current commitments.
The Resolution Foundation has claimed that population growth through immigration will deliver a fiscal boost of around £5 billion a year by the end of the decade, but this seems unlikely. The huge increase in immigration from 2021-24 failed to improve GDP per capita or productivity. Similarly high waves of immigration in countries like Canada also failed to deliver economic growth while placing huge stress on the housing market and country.
During that 2021-24 period, immigration shifted from EEA to non-EEA migrants, who studies show are more likely to be a net cost. Only a minority of those arriving were in highly-paid occupations, which indicates that they are unlikely to become fiscally positive later.
This fiscal position will get even worse, as those who arrived in 2021-24 receive ILR over the next few years and are able to fully access welfare. Most studies also fail to factor in that migration dilutes capital stock, as more investment is needed to maintain the same level of available infrastructure.
This is most clear when it comes to the housing market, where the Government has indicated it wants to build 1.5m new homes in this parliament. If the net immigration projections are accurate then that will fall short of what is needed just for new arrivals, let alone being able to ease the existing housing crisis.
By the beginning of the 2020s, the share of the British population born overseas was around 14%. This will already be higher after high immigration in 2021-24 and will increase if these projections are accurate, probably rising to around a fifth of the population by 2032. That will only increase integration issues, which were already evident in the Leicester riot of 2022, the Harehills riot of 2024 and the summer riots of 2024.
Without any migration at all, the ONS projects the population would halve in 100 years. This is unlikely, however, as it would require current trends to continue unchanged for a century. For comparison, 1922 was only one year after the creation of the first birth-control clinic by Marie Stopes and decades before easy divorce. During the century 1922-2022 there were several spikes in the birth rate, including a major one between 1955-1965 – the ‘Baby Boom’.
Although touted as a solution to ageing populations or the need for economic growth, mass immigration has been tried for over a quarter of a century and has failed to solve these issues, while it has added new problems and greater costs. Instead, the route to economic security lies where it always did: in increasing growth.
This is clear when we look at the United States, where cheap energy and fewer regulations underpin their prosperity. If Britain wants to deal with an ageing population, then it should focus on cutting back onerous regulations, shrinking the size of the state and slashing immigration to a minimum, so that firms invest in productivity-raising technology rather than relying on cheap labour. Britain might be ageing but it could be growing too.
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