SOARING immigration saw the population grow by almost 610,000 last year – the largest annual increase since 1948.
A flood of arrivals pushed the total tally in England and Wales to 60.9million and sparked calls for more border controls to ease strained public services.
New official stats released yesterday show 1.08million people came to the country between 2022-23, while just 462,000 left.
There were only 400 more births than deaths last year meaning organic population change was effectively nothing, while around 13,000 moved to either Scotland or Northern Ireland.
The immigration surge – almost entirely all legal – brought the total net increase in the population to 609,500 – equivalent to a city the size of Brighton.
The surge is the biggest hike in 75 years when the population grew by 1.5million in 1948 as soldiers returned from the Second World War along with a baby boom.
Reform MP and leader Nigel Farage told The Sun: “These are, once again, mind-blowing immigration numbers.”
Robert Bates, research director at the Centre for Migration Control, warned Britain was “hurtling towards a population crisis”.
He said: “The majority of young people have been forced out of the housing market, our hospitals and GPs are oversubscribed and under resourced, our classrooms bursting at the seams, and our culture and communities are changing at a dizzying speed.
“We are an island. Common sense dictates that we cannot accommodate an ever expanding population.
“The British people never voted for the mass migration agenda and our politicians need to urgently recognise the scale of the problem.”
It ups the ante on Sir Keir Starmer to wrestle down net migration after insisting the current levels were too high.
During the election campaign the new PM said “read my lips – I will bring immigration numbers down”.
The areas with the highest rates of population growth were London (17.5 per cent), Cardiff (3.4 per cent), and Preston (three per cent).
Middlesbrough had the highest number of international immigrants as a proportion of its population in the year to mid-2023 (4.6 per cent), as well as Coventry (4.4 per cent), Newham (4.0 per cent), and Leicester (3.6 per cent).
