Local data on migrants in the UK

Census data provide a count of people residing in a locality at the time of the Census. Census data provide more accurate figures at the local level than estimates based on surveys but, as they are only conducted every 10 years in the UK, they do not give up-to-date information on population trends. For some groups, such as Romanians and Bulgarians, most of whom arrived after 2011, these figures are less useful than those from other, more timely sources – for example, the Annual Population Survey. However, for other groups, the Census may still be the best source of data – for example, longer-term residents whose numbers are not likely to shift dramatically over time.

The latest Census in England and Wales took place March 2021, although local level information on migration is not expected to be released until late 2022. Scotland conducted its Census in March 2022. This guide will be updated with data from the 2021 and 2022 Censuses, as they are made available. For the moment, this guide presents decennial data from 2011.

This guide uses the 2011 Census in Figure 13 to present local level data on the share of the population whose main language at home is not English, Gaelic, Scots or Welsh.

To learn more about the Census, visit the ONS website.

Information about the Department for Education’s School Census is available in the section on Administrative data.

The International Passenger Survey (IPS), long since stretched beyond its original purpose, formed the basis of immigration, emigration and net migration (flow) estimates in what was historically one of ONS’ main migration publications, Migration Statistics Quarterly Report (MSQR). Due to COVID-19, the IPS was suspended on 16 March 2020. It was reintroduced in January 2021 but without the migrant sample boost it previously had, further reducing its value as a source of migration data. The MSQR was retired in August 2020, although ONS still uses the IPS to produce a limited set of tables. ONS continues on its statistical ‘transformation journey’ to make better use of administrative data for their migration statistics.

Separate estimates are produced for long-term (12 months or more) and short-term (3–12 months) immigration, both of which are presented in this guide. To produce long-term immigration estimates at the local authority level, ONS uses the published estimates at larger geographies and then uses administrative data to distribute them across local authorities. Similarly, for short-term immigration estimates, ONS uses published short-term immigration totals derived from the IPS data for non-British workers and students staying for at least 3 but less than 12 months (UN definition). Worker and student totals are then distributed by mapping the IPS definitions as closely as possible to the relevant data within the administrative sources provided by other government departments. In both cases, the national-level IPS estimates come with margins of error, and the local-level numbers are also estimates rather than precise figures, and come with their own, often large, margins of error. Figures 3 and 4 in this guide present these data.

IPS estimates are not sufficient to measure immigration to Northern Ireland, because they do not account for movements across the Irish border. To compensate, the Northern Ireland Statistics Agency (NISRA) has supplemented ONS figures with GP registrations data. One result of this is that short-term immigration estimates are not available for Northern Ireland. Supplementary analysis of the data for Northern Ireland, which is also available through ONS, is provided by NISRA.

Learn more about the IPS and how it was affected by COVID-19 from the ONS.

The Annual Population Survey (APS), which is used for the ONS dataset, Population of the UK by Country of Birth and Nationality, is a survey of individuals and households in the UK. The National Records of Scotland (NRS) also uses the APS to provide estimates specific to Scottish local authorities, in a similar publication called Population by Country of Birth and Nationality. APSdata are used in Figure 1, 2 and 14 of this guide

These data are used in Figure 1 of guide to show the number and share of international migrants living in each local authority.

APS estimates are not available for local authorities in Northern Ireland. The APS does not cover all migrants evenly. Estimates exclude people living in communal establishments – e.g., hotels and caravan parks – and may undercount subgroups of people with lower-than-average response rates to the survey, such as the recently arrived and short-term migrants. Response rates have declined over the past 20 years.

As with the IPS, the ONS suspended face-to-face data collection for the APS in March 2020, quickly transitioning to new methods, such as the use of telephone interviews, which caused problems in four areas:

• weighting the survey;
• inputting for non-response;
• seasonally adjusting the data;
• the quality of survey estimates.

This means that data from 2020 onwards should not be directly compared with data from before the pandemic. Read more about the APS and the impacts of COVID-19 on the APS on the ONS website.

Margins of error in survey data
Caution must be used when examining estimates of small groups because of margins of error. Estimates represent what is considered to be the most likely figure, but the true number could be higher or lower. APS and IPS data are reported with 95% confidence intervals which indicate the margins of error. For example, the estimated non-UK born population residing in the UK in 2020 was 9,539,000, with a confidence interval of +/- 170,000, according to the APS. One effect of this is that it may not be sensible to make too much of the difference between two estimates – small differences may result from statistical noise rather than real changes in the population. Users should look at the trend over several years as in some cases the apparent year-on-year change may be misleading.

In some local areas, confidence intervals are quite wide relative to estimates of the population of interest. For example, the estimated EU born population living in Swansea was 10,000 in 2019 and 2020, with a confidence interval of +/-4,000. The corresponding estimate for the year 2018 was 8,000 (+/-3,000). In other words, the data do not show with certainty that the EU born population of Swansea changed between 2018 and 2020, a point that is compounded when taking into account the aforementioned problems with data collection over this period due to the pandemic.

Covid-19 changed the way many administrative processes were carried out, in some cases bringing systems nearly to a full stop and creating significant backlogs. National Insurance Number registrations and visa applications, for example, were especially impacted. This unprecedented health crisis undoubtedly affected behaviours towards health care professionals, which may be reflected in GP registration data. In light of Covid-19, particular care should be taken when using administrative data sources to illuminate migration trends.

National Insurance Number (NINo) data

National Insurance Number (NINo) data provide information on non-UK nationals at the point they first register for a NINo, with data provided by local authority (the place of residence rather than the place of work).

A NINo is generally required for anyone who wants to work or claim benefits, but will exclude many people who are neither working nor claiming benefits, including children. It is therefore not a measure of international migration inflows, because applicants may have come to the UK months or even years before registering and because some migrants will not have NINos. A person can only register once for a NINo, so if they leave the UK for several years this will not be recorded and if they return they will not be included again in the new registrations data. NINo processing was severely disrupted during the Covid-19 pandemic, further stressing the capacity of this data source to illuminate migration trends.

This guide presents local authority level NINo registration data by nationality in Figure 5.

To learn more about NINo data, please click here.

GP registration data
GP registration data include people registering with a GP for the first time where their previous address was outside of the UK. If someone moves within the UK and registers with a new GP practice, however, this and any subsequent registrations will not be flagged as a migrant registration. GP registration is not compulsory and some migrants will only register with a GP when they require medical attention. As such, these data should not be considered an accurate measure of all immigration inflows.

For GP registration data by local authority, see Figure 6 in this guide.

To learn more about GP registration data and its use in the production of official migration statistics, please visit the ONS website.

Home Office data
Home Office data provide information on people in contact with the Home Office for different reasons, e.g., citizenship or asylum applications. Most Home Office data are only available at the national level, although exceptions include data on asylum seekers in receipt of Section 95 support, refugees resettled through the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (VPRS) and people attending citizenship ceremonies.

Local authority data on asylum seekers in receipt of Section 95 support include asylum seekers who are destitute and whose claims are still pending. The local-authority level figures do not include people on Section 98 support, which is provided while a claim for Section 95 support is being considered, or Section 4 support, which may be provided to asylum seekers whose claims have been refused but who are temporarily unable to leave the UK. People with private incomes are likewise excluded from these statistics.

For local level data on asylum-seekers and refugees, see Figures 7, 8 and 9 in this guide.

For more information about Section 95, asylum and refugee resettlement in the UK please see the Migration Observatory briefing, Migration to the UK: Asylum and Resettled Refugees.

Local-authority level data on applications to the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) and their outcomes, which are presented in Figure 15 of this guide, are published by the Home Office on a quarterly basis. This publication contains information on applications by nationality, applications by age group and concluded applications by outcome. It is important to bear in mind the many limitations of these data, which are classified as Experimental Statistics (more information on this classification available here). Perhaps most critically, these data: do not indicate how many people are eligible to apply for the EUSS or how many have not applied; include an unknown number of applications lodged by people who have already left the UK; include multiple applications launched by the same person, i.e., ‘double counting’. For more information on what the data do and do not say, see the Home Office EU Settlement Scheme Statistics User Guide.

To learn more, please visit the Home Office website.

Data on looked-after children
Local authorities in England are required to collect annual data on all children in their care as well as those who are provided with accommodation for a continuous period of more than 24 hours, are subject to a care order under the Children Act 1989, Part IV, or subject to being placed in foster care by the local authority. Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASCs) are recorded in this dataset, so long as they were a UASC at any time during the reporting period and meet the definition of a UASC:

• Under 18 years of age when their asylum claim was submitted
• Claiming asylum in their own right
• Separated from both parents and are not being cared for by a responsible adult

UASC status ceases when a child is granted humanitarian protection, UASC leave or refugee status; their asylum claim is rejected; on their 18th birthday.

Data on UASCs in English local authorities are presented in Figure 8.

To learn more, visit the Department for Education’s website.

HESA student data
The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) student data provides information on UK students by place of domicile, rather than place of birth or nationality. Domicile is defined as the place of ‘normal residence’ before taking up study. This means that non-UK domiciled students will include some UK citizens who have been living abroad before coming back to the UK to study. The data primarily come from higher education providers and are supplemented by information from the Initial Teacher Training record (for students on a teaching training course) and the Aggregate Offshore record (for students studying overseas).

HESA also collects data on mode of study – full-time versus part-time – and level of study – degree, postgraduate taught, postgraduate research – to name just a few additional variables.

Some of these data are freely available on the HESA website although this guide makes use of a tailored dataset purchased from HESA to show the share of international students among all higher education students for every UK local authority (see Figure 10).

To learn more about HESA’s student data, visit its website here.

Birth statistics
Statistics on the number of live births are produced by the relevant national statistics offices in the UK nations. Date of birth is based on the date of registration rather than the date of the birth itself. In the UK, the mandated period for registering a birth is between 21 (Scotland) and 42 (England, Northern Ireland and Wales) days. This gap between birth and registration, as well as late registrations, means that a small number of births counted in the reference year will have occured in the previous year.

At the local level, birth statistics distinguish between UK born and non-UK born mothers. Figure 11 presents births to non-UK born mothers as a share of total births. Many non-UK born mothers will have lived in the UK for a significant period of time before giving birth. Information about fathers’ country of birth is not available by local authority.

For more information see the NISRA (Northern Ireland), ONS (England and Wales) and NRS (Scotland) websites.

School Census data
School Census data cover a range of characteristics of pupils and their schools as of January each year, including first language and ethnicity of pupils. After 2018, the school census no longer includes country of birth and nationality. Like education itself, the production of local authority level data on the first language of school pupils at state-funded schools is a devolved matter in the UK. This information can be accessed as follows:

• England: data produced by the Department of Education (DfE) are available online.
• Scotland: similar data, deriving from the student census, is made available for download by the Scottish government, although 2019/20 data were unavailable at time of publication.
• Northern Ireland: similar data on ‘newcomer pupils’ in Northern Ireland is published by its Department of Education. These figures likely exclude those who speak English as an additional language at a high level.
• Wales: the website of StatsWales publishes data on pupils aged 5 and over with a first language other than English or Welsh by local authority, region and year in interactive tables and standard data files, although not by primary and secondary pupils. Data used in Figure 12 were provided to Migration Observatory by StatsWales in response to a request and will be made available on the StatsWales ad-hoc statistical requests webpage.

To protect confidentiality, only data which cannot identify an individual pupil in a given school are made publicly available.

To see the share of primary and secondary pupils with a first language other than English in local authorities, see Figure 12 of this guide. More information is available online.

Population projections
ONS produces population projections for the UK and local authorities based on a number of assumptions, such as the fertility rate, life expectancy and the level of migration. These figures therefore provide some indication of future changes in the size of the immigrant population in relation to the rest of the UK population. Population projections are not forecasts and come with significant uncertainty as a result of changing demographic and economic trends as well as changes to government policy, including migration policy.

Population projections are provided separately for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and generally cover a period of 25 years. Figure 17 of this guide brings these data sets together.

• England: ONS provides data for download on the expected annual contribution of migration to future populations across local authorities in England for 25 years.
• Scotland: NRS provides similar data to the ONS for local authorities in Scotland.
• Wales: The Welsh Government provides local-level population projections for Wales.
• Northern Ireland: Population projections for Northern Ireland are published by NISRA. The contribution of migration to population growth in local areas is accessible on their website through an interactive dashboard or by downloading the data.

The estimates for England and Wales presented in the above chart come from the ONS dataset, Population of the UK by Country of Birth and Nationality, which is based on from The Annual Population Survey (APS). The National Records of Scotland (NRS) also uses the APS to provide estimates specific to Scottish local authorities, in a similar publication called Population by Country of Birth and Nationality. APS estimates are not available for local authorities in Northern Ireland.

The APS does not cover all migrants evenly. Estimates exclude people living in communal establishments – e.g., hotels and caravan parks – and may undercount subgroups of people with lower-than-average response rates to the survey, such as the recently arrived and short-term migrants. Response rates have declined over the past 20 years.

As with the IPS, the ONS suspended face-to-face data collection for the APS in March 2020, quickly transitioning to new methods, such as the use of telephone interviews, which caused problems in four areas:

• weighting the survey;
• inputting for non-response;
• seasonally adjusting the data;
• the quality of survey estimates.

This means that data from 2020 onwards should not be directly compared with data from before the pandemic. Read more about the APS and the impacts of COVID-19 on the APS on the ONS website.

The estimates for England and Wales presented in the above chart come from the ONS dataset, Population of the UK by Country of Birth and Nationality, which is based on from The Annual Population Survey (APS). The National Records of Scotland (NRS) also uses the APS to provide estimates specific to Scottish local authorities, in a similar publication called Population by Country of Birth and Nationality. APS estimates are not available for local authorities in Northern Ireland.

The APS does not cover all migrants evenly. Estimates exclude people living in communal establishments – e.g., hotels and caravan parks – and may undercount subgroups of people with lower-than-average response rates to the survey, such as the recently arrived and short-term migrants. Response rates have declined over the past 20 years.

As with the IPS, the ONS suspended face-to-face data collection for the APS in March 2020, quickly transitioning to new methods, such as the use of telephone interviews, which caused problems in four areas:

• weighting the survey;
• inputting for non-response;
• seasonally adjusting the data;
• the quality of survey estimates.

This means that data from 2020 onwards should not be directly compared with data from before the pandemic. Read more about the APS and the impacts of COVID-19 on the APS on the ONS website.

The above figure presents data from what was historically one of ONS’ main migration publications, the Migration Statistics Quarterly Report (MSQR). The MSQR is based on the International Passenger Survey (IPS), which has formed the basis of immigration, emigration and net migration (flow) estimate, despite being long since stretched beyond its original purpose. Due to COVID-19, the IPS was suspended on 16 March 2020. It was reintroduced in January 2021 but without the migrant sample boost it previously had, further reducing its value as a source of migration data. The MSQR was retired in August 2020, although ONS still uses the IPS to produce a limited set of tables. ONS continues on its statistical ‘transformation journey’ to make better use of administrative data for their migration statistics.

Separate estimates are produced for long-term (12 months or more) and short-term (3–12 months) immigration. To produce the estimates of long-term immigration at the local authority level, pictured above, ONS uses the published estimates at larger geographies and then uses administrative data to distribute them across local authorities. National-level IPS estimates come with margins of error , and the local-level numbers, which are also estimates rather than precise figures, come with their own, often large, margins of error.

IPS estimates are not sufficient to measure immigration to Northern Ireland, because they do not account for movements across the Irish border. However, the Northern Ireland Statistics Agency (NISRA) has supplemented ONS figures with GP registrations data, to generate the estimates presented above.

Learn more about the IPS and how it was affected by COVID-19 from the ONS.

The above figure presents data from what was historically one of ONS’ main migration publications, the Migration Statistics Quarterly Report (MSQR). The MSQR is based on the International Passenger Survey (IPS), which has formed the basis of immigration, emigration and net migration (flow) estimate, despite being long since stretched beyond its original purpose. Due to COVID-19, the IPS was suspended on 16 March 2020. It was reintroduced in January 2021 but without the migrant sample boost it previously had, further reducing its value as a source of migration data. The MSQR was retired in August 2020, although ONS still uses the IPS to produce a limited set of tables. ONS continues on its statistical ‘transformation journey’ to make better use of administrative data for their migration statistics.

Separate estimates are produced for long-term (12 months or more) and short-term (3–12 months) immigration. To produce the estimates of short-term immigration at the local level, ONS uses published short-term immigration totals derived from the IPS data at larger geographies for non-British workers and students staying for at least 3 but less than 12 months (UN definition). Worker and student totals are then distributed across the UK by mapping the IPS definitions as closely as possible to the relevant data within the administrative sources provided by other government departments.

Just as estimates at larger geographies come with margins of error , the local-level numbers, which are also estimates rather than precise figures, come with their own, often large, margins of error.

As is the case with long-term immigration estimates, the IPS is unable to provide sufficiently robust short-term immigration estimates for Northern Ireland, because it does not account for movements across the Irish border. One result of this is that short-term immigration estimates are not available for Northern Ireland. Supplementary analysis of the data for Northern Ireland, which is also available through ONS, is provided by NISRA.

Learn more about the IPS and how it was affected by COVID-19 from the ONS.

National Insurance Number (NINo) data provide information on non-UK nationals at the point they first register for a NINo, with data provided by local authority (the place of residence rather than the place of work).

A NINo is generally required for anyone who wants to work or claim benefits, but will exclude many people who are neither working nor claiming benefits, including children. It is therefore not a measure of international migration inflows, because applicants may have come to the UK months or even years before registering and because some migrants will not have NINos. A person can only register once for a NINo, so if they leave the UK for several years this will not be recorded and if they return they will not be included again in the new registrations data. NINo processing was severely disrupted during the Covid-19 pandemic, further stressing the capacity of this data source to illuminate migration trends.

To learn more about NINo data, please click here.

GP registration data include people registering with a GP for the first time where their previous address was outside of the UK. If someone moves within the UK and registers with a new GP practice, however, this and any subsequent registrations will not be flagged as a migrant registration. GP registration is not compulsory and some migrants will only register with a GP when they require medical attention. As such, these data should not be considered an accurate measure of all immigration inflows.

To learn more about GP registration data and its use in the production of official migration statistics, please visit the ONS website.

The Home Office produces the above pictured local authority-level data on asylum seekers in receipt of Section 95 support, meaning asylum seekers who are destitute and whose claims are still pending. The figures do not include people on Section 98 support, which is provided while a claim for Section 95 support is being considered, or Section 4 support, which may be provided to asylum seekers whose claims have been refused but who are temporarily unable to leave the UK. People with private incomes are likewise excluded from these statistics.

More information about asylum statistics can be found on the Home Office website and the Migration Observatory briefing, Asylum and refugee resettlement in the UK.

Local authorities in England are required to collect annual data on all children in their care as well as those who are provided with accommodation for a continuous period of more than 24 hours, are subject to a care order under the Children Act 1989, Part IV, or subject to being placed in foster care by the local authority. Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASCs – presented above) are recorded in this dataset, so long as they were a UASC at any time during the reporting period and meet the definition of a UASC:

• Under 18 years of age when their asylum claim was submitted
• Claiming asylum in their own right
• Separated from both parents and are not being cared for by a responsible adult

UASC status ceases when a child is granted humanitarian protection, UASC leave or refugee status; their asylum claim is rejected; on their 18th birthday.

To learn more, visit the Department for Education’s website.

The Home Office publishes local authority-level figures on the number of refugees brought to the UK under different resettlement schemes, such as:

• The Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (VPRS), launched in 2014 to help refugees of the Syrian conflict. In 2021, it reached its aim of resettling 20,000 people and was closed.
• The Vulnerable Children’s Resettlement Scheme (VCRS), launched in 2016, aimed to resettle 3,000 ‘at risk’ children and their families from the Middle East and North Africa region by 2020. This route was closed with the ending of the VPRS.
• The Gateway Protection Programme (GPP), which was open to refugees from across the global from 2004 to 2020.

The above chart presents data on those resettled under the VPRS and VCRS schemes between 2014 and 2021. Some refugees will have moved to other parts of the UK after their initial resettlement – such changes are not reflected in the data. These schemes were suspended between March and December 2020 in response to Covid-19 – see the ICIBI report, An inspection of UK Refugee Resettlement Schemes (November 2019 – May 2020) for more information on the effect of the pandemic on UK resettlement.

The Home Office website and the Migration Observatory briefing, Asylum and refugee resettlement in the UK, provide additional detail on resettlement statistics.

The above figure presents information on higher education students in the UK as reported by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). HESA collects information about students’ place of domicile (as opposed to country of birth or nationality), which is defined as the place of ‘normal residence’ before taking up study. This means that non-UK domiciled students will include some UK citizens who have been living abroad before coming back to the UK to study. The data primarily come from higher education providers and are supplemented by information from the Initial Teacher Training record (for students on a teaching training course) and the Aggregate Offshore record (for students studying overseas).

HESA also collects data on mode of study – full-time versus part-time – and level of study – degree, postgraduate taught, postgraduate research – to name just a few additional variables.

Some of these data are freely available on the HESA website although this guide makes use of a tailored dataset purchased from HESA.

To learn more about HESA’s student data, visit its website here.

Statistics on the number of live births are produced by the relevant national statistics offices in the UK nations. Date of birth is based on the date of registration rather than the date of the birth itself. In the UK, the mandated period for registering a birth is between 21 (Scotland) and 42 (England, Northern Ireland and Wales) days. This gap between birth and registration, as well as late registrations, means that a small number of births counted in the reference year will have occurred in the previous year.

At the local level, birth statistics distinguish between UK born and non-UK born mothers. Many non-UK born mothers will have lived in the UK for a significant period of time before giving birth. Information about fathers’ country of birth is not available by local authority.
For more information see the NISRA (Northern Ireland), ONS (England and Wales) and NRS (Scotland) websites.

The above figure presents School Census data on the language of pupils at the local level, in primary and secondary state funded schools. The School Census covers a range of characteristics of pupils and their schools as of January each year, including first language and ethnicity, although it no longer asks about country of birth and nationality. Like education itself, the production of local authority level data on the first language of school pupils at state-funded schools is a devolved matter in the UK. This information can be accessed as follows:

• England: data produced by the Department of Education (DfE) are available online.
• Scotland: similar data, deriving from the student census, is made available for download by the Scottish government.
• Northern Ireland: similar data on ‘newcomer pupils’ in Northern Ireland is published by its Department of Education. These figures likely exclude those who speak English as an additional language at a high level.
• Wales: the website of StatsWales publishes data on pupils aged 5 and over with a first language other than English or Welsh by local authority, region and year in interactive tables and standard data files, although not by primary and secondary pupils. Specially requested data are made available on the StatsWales ad-hoc statistical requests webpage.

To protect confidentiality, only data which cannot identify an individual pupil in a given school are made publicly available.

More information about School Census data is available online.

Census data provide a count of people residing in a locality at the time of the Census. Census data provide more accurate figures at the local level than estimates based on surveys but, as they are only conducted every 10 years in the UK, they do not give up-to-date information on population trends. For some groups, such as Romanians and Bulgarians, most of whom arrived after 2011, these figures are less useful than those from other, timelier sources – for example, the Annual Population Survey. However, for other groups, the Census may still be the best source of data – for example, longer-term residents whose numbers are not likely to shift dramatically over time.

The latest Census in England and Wales took place March 2021, although local level information on migration is not expected to be released until late 2022. Scotland conducted its Census in March 2022. This guide will be updated with data from the 2021 and 2022 Censuses, as they are made available. For the moment, decennial data from 2011 are presented in the above figure.

To learn more about the Census, visit the ONS website.

The estimates for England and Wales presented in the above chart come from the ONS dataset, Population of the UK by Country of Birth and Nationality, which is based on from The Annual Population Survey (APS). The National Records of Scotland (NRS) also uses the APS to provide estimates specific to Scottish local authorities, in a similar publication called Population by Country of Birth and Nationality. APS estimates are not available for local authorities in Northern Ireland.

The APS does not cover all migrants evenly. Estimates exclude people living in communal establishments – e.g., hotels and caravan parks – and may undercount subgroups of people with lower-than-average response rates to the survey, such as the recently arrived and short-term migrants. Response rates have declined over the past 20 years.

As with the IPS, the ONS suspended face-to-face data collection for the APS in March 2020, quickly transitioning to new methods, such as the use of telephone interviews, which caused problems in four areas:

• weighting the survey;
• inputting for non-response;
• seasonally adjusting the data;
• the quality of survey estimates.

This means that data from 2020 onwards should not be directly compared with data from before the pandemic. Read more about the APS and the impacts of COVID-19 on the APS on the ONS website.

Local-authority level data on applications to the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) and their outcomes, presented above, are published by the Home Office on a quarterly basis and contain information on applications by nationality of applicant, applications by age group and concluded applications by outcome.

It is important to bear in mind the many limitations of these data, which are classified as Experimental Statistics (more information on this classification available here). Perhaps most critically, these data: do not indicate how many people are eligible to apply for the EUSS or how many have not applied; include an unknown number of applications lodged by people who have already left the UK; include multiple applications launched by the same person, i.e., ‘double counting’.

For more information on what the data do and do not say, see the Home Office’s EU Settlement Scheme Statistics User Guide and the Migration Observatory report, Not Settled Yet? Understanding the EU Settlement Scheme using the Available Data.

The Home Office publishes administrative data on the number of foreign citizens over the age of 18 attending citizenship ceremonies which, since 2004, is the final step in the naturalisation process.

ONS produces population projections for the UK and local authorities based on a number of assumptions, such as the fertility rate, life expectancy and the level of migration. These figures therefore provide some indication of future changes in the size of the immigrant population in relation to the rest of the UK population. Population projections are not forecasts and come with significant uncertainty as a result of changing demographic and economic trends as well as changes to government policy, including migration policy.

Population projections are provided separately for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and generally cover a period of 25 years. These data sets are brought together in the above figure.

• England: ONS provides data for download on the expected annual contribution of migration to future populations across local authorities in England for 25 years.
• Scotland: NRS provides similar data to the ONS for local authorities in Scotland.
• Wales: The Welsh Government provides local-level population projections for Wales.
• Northern Ireland: Population projections for Northern Ireland are published by NISRA. The contribution of migration to population growth in local areas is accessible on their website through an interactive dashboard or by downloading the data.