FOI reference: FOI-2024-2405
You asked
I am requesting updated data on the UK population by country of birth and nationality, which stopped being published in 2021. I would like to request this data updated to 2023. I would also like to clarify the reason why this data stopped being updated.
We said
Thank you for your freedom of information request.
The Office for National Statistics' (ONS) previous series of population estimates by country of birth and nationality based on data from the Annual Population Survey (APS) and Labour Force Survey (LFS), was discontinued in October 2022 due to underlying data issues. The ongoing transformation of population and migration statistics programme aims to make the best use of all available data and review the best methods to produce estimates of the UK population in the future. The most recent estimates are those published for the year ending June 2021. As such, we do not hold any more recent iterations of this analysis.
Census 2021 is currently our best estimate of the population of England and Wales by country of birth and passports held. While this source provides the best picture of society at a moment in time, we acknowledge that there is a need for more timely and frequent statistics at a consistent level of quality. Provisional estimates for the year ending June 2022, produced by rolling forward Census 2021 estimates and accounting for population change, were published in International migration research, progress update: November 2022.
These indicated that the non-EU-born population of England and Wales was 6,864,000 and the EU-born population was 3,545,000 in June 2022. However, these estimates are not available broken down for individual countries of birth or by nationality. In the future, with the support of our partners, including all devolved administrations, our ambition is to produce a UK estimate of the non-UK-born population that is consistent with overall population and migration estimates.
Our transformation work also aims to explore new methods for providing more detailed estimates, such as for individual nationalities, including use of data from the transformed LFS (TLFS) and the dynamic population model (DPM), which uses a statistical modelling approach to draw strength from a range of survey and administrative data sources.