The population gap between us and our baguette-loving neighbour has been gradually closing for a few decades. But experts now predict that the number of people living in the UK will overtake France by 2025 for the first time in history.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) announced this week that net migration to the UK reached over 600,000 in 2022. France’s equivalent estimates that its net migration is around 161,000. Right now the population count for each country is 67.03 million and 67.71 million respectively. If migration levels remain the same, the UK will surpass France to become the second most populated European country after Germany (not including Turkey or Russia, which are not wholly in Europe) which has a population of 83.13 million.
According to the ONS, the increase is a result of 1.2 million immigrants entering the country, the vast majority of whom were EU nationals here for work, study or humanitarian reasons. The research estimates that around 172,000 arrived through temporary refugee resettlement schemes from places like Ukraine and Afghanistan while 76,000 had applied for asylum.
Both France and the UK have pretty even levels of what’s known as ‘natural change’ – the number of births minus the number of deaths. But apparently our levels of fertility are well below that needed to create a population rise on its own.
Jonathan Portes, a former top civil servant, said that migration has helped to make up for this lack of baby-making, and that a rising population is much better than a declining one. He told The i: ‘Rising population is a problem as you have congestion, where do you build the houses? We are more dense, and that’s bad.
‘But falling population is a much worse problem where you get deserted villages, an older population with fewer workers, places where there are no or few kids which does not feel like a dynamic, vibrant country.’
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