UK Population and Immigration

The population of the UK is currently about 70 million and increasing, but the increase is largely due to immigration. 

At some historical points the number of births in the UK was lower than the number of births, ie the number of births was less than the “replacement rate”. This has been affected over the years by various things, for example coronavirus, which had a significant impact on the number of deaths, so it is always a moving picture. 

The most recent figures available for population are for the period mid-2023 to mid-2024. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) tells us that over that period the UK population grew by 754,957, which is in relative terms a large increase. But the interesting thing about this is that only 16,239 of this figure was due to natural population growth, ie births compared to deaths. The remainder of 738,718 came by way of net migration, ie the number of migrants leaving the UK subtracted from the number which came here. 

As it is now late 2025 these figures are of course already out of date; if we could know the precise figures now they would be different. The timing for natural population growth figures and immigration figures is different; immigration figures are more up-to-date, and from the immigration figures we can get some sort of idea about what the overall population figure is likely to be at the moment. 

We know that net migration fell significantly in late 2024; in December 2024 it had fallen sharply to just 431,000 over the past year. Readers of this blog will know that governments have in recent times taken strong measures to reduce net migration – by for example limiting student dependant visas and abolishing the care worker visa routes. 

Natural population growth is likely to remain stable and it seems very likely that overall population growth will have fallen by quite a lot in the mid-2024 to mid-2025 period. We shall know when the figures come out and in the meantime it is noteworthy that the present Government is coming up with more and more interesting ways of limiting migration, and indeed they are competing with other political parties in this respect.

Oliver Westmoreland

Senior Immigration Lawyer