According to a study, nearly 1.3 million foreign-born people may have left UK between 2019 and 2020, says an article published in BBC news.
The number of people living in the UK could have fallen significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic.
ESCOE report
The report, by the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCOE), was followed by a similar study from University of Oxford, which suggested that between about 400,000 and 600,000 people had departed.
Younger working-age people in their 20s and 30s had left in the greatest numbers, according to the Oxford report. It’s thought that many had been working in pubs, cafes and restaurants when Covid-19 struck.
An estimation of population
The gathering of the normal information used to calculate official population estimates has been seriously disrupted by the pandemic.
The Office for National Statistics normally works out how many people are leaving the country by talking to a sample of travellers at places like airports, but stopped doing that in March last year.
There are other useful sources of information like surveys, which are used to estimate what proportion of the workforce or population comes from abroad.
The foreign-born who left the Country
According to the head of BBC news, ”The estimates, based on more realistic assumptions are considerably higher, a figure of 500,000 is not unreasonable.”
The lowest estimates of the fall in the foreign-born population, are about 400,000. And that figure assumes that the UK population has continued to grow at pre-pandemic rates, despite nearly 60,000 extra deaths by last summer and fewer and fewer foreign-born people showing up in surveys.
A figure of 500,000 is roughly equivalent to the population of Leeds.
The researchers behind the higher estimate of 1.3 million say that it’s an illustrative calculation, and that it’s very unlikely that the real number is any higher.
Young workers to be the most to leave
Analysis by University of Oxford suggests that younger working-age people left in the greatest numbers.
That is to be expected, researchers say, as younger people tend to be less settled and have fewer dependents.
It’s possible that about a fifth of all foreign-born people in their 20s left the UK.
A blur vision of the population
A clearer population picture should emerge from the results of the census, but as it is conducted only every 10 years, it won’t tell us about changes between 2019 and 2020.
Other data from tax records, pensions and visas may help the ONS and others to update their estimates. The ONS says that new figures will be published soon. But it may well be that we will never know for certain how many people left when Covid-19 arrived in the UK.
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Source :BBC News
