“Alongside their increasing share of the population, higher fertility among women born outside the United Kingdom has also had an impact”.
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Foreign born women make up an increasing share of the female population of childbearing age in England and Wales.
The Annual Population Survey (APS) revealed that in 2015 Poland was the birth country of 831,000 United Kingdom residents.
There were 831,000 Polish-born people living in Britain previous year, putting the country ahead of India and Ireland as the traditional source of large foreign-born populations.
Lord Green, of campaign group Migration Watch UK, said: “Unfortunately, these figures show no progress in reducing net migration from the record level of one third of a million a year”.
Overall, one in eight people living in the United Kingdom past year was born overseas, while one in 12 had non-British nationality – compared with one in 11 and one in 20 in 2004 respectively.
When compared with figures from 2003 – a year before Poland joined the European Union – the population of Poles in Great Britain has increased more than twentyfold.
Polish was also the most common non-British nationality, with an estimated 916,000 residents.
Theresa May is under intense pressure to find ways of curbing immigration after it emerged numbers are still running at more than triple the government’s target.
Net migration has also reached a record 327,000 in 2015. They will renew demands for the government to press ahead with plans to cut ties with Brussels.
The latest net migration figures show a slowdown in the numbers settling in the United Kingdom from Poland and seven other former Eastern bloc countries – but that was offset by an increase in net migration from Bulgaria and Romania, which hit record levels of 60,000. The main catalysts for migration to the United Kingdom have been work, followed by education, though the latter has seen a large drop-off in recent times.
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A net total of 43,000 Britons left the country over the 12 months.
