THE NEWS that net migration to Britain is plummeting should have been met with cheers from across the political spectrum. But something in the statistics released on November 27th bothered commentators: the number of British citizens emigrating appears to have rocketed in recent years. The Times and Telegraph called it an “exodus”. The Daily Mail called it a “brain drain from Starmer’s socialist chaos”. They could not be more wrong.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) confirmed that total net migration—inflows less outflows—was just 204,000 in the year to June, the lowest level since March 2021. That overall figure is composed of three types of people: Europeans, non-Europeans and British citizens. Look at just the last group in isolation and the net outflow of British citizens has risen from 82,000 to 109,000 over the past six years, a 33% increase.
What has driven this? Certainly not the current government. The ONS recently switched from measuring migration of Britons via a survey conducted at airports to using tax and benefit records. As statisticians will not gain access to this year’s tax data until October 2026, they have had to make assumptions about movements in the interim. Madeleine Sumption from Oxford University’s Migration Observatory says the new method “may pick up people who appear to have left the country but have in fact stayed put”.
It is the apparent increased outflow of British citizens that vexes conservative newspapers. The ONS estimates that emigration rose from an average of around 150,000 a year before Brexit to 250,000 today. But that is simply an artefact of switching statistical methods. Although the ONS has revised pre-2021 net-migration figures based on Census records, it has little idea about the true picture of emigration before this date. It also thinks today’s 250,000 figure could perhaps lie anywhere between 220,000 and 300,000.
To get a sense of whether there is indeed an exodus, The Economist has done some number-crunching of its own. Using data on the flow of Britons to destination countries published by the OECD and the UN, we find that emigration of British citizens is, in fact, likely to be lower than it was several years ago. Our estimates suggest that in the years before Brexit emigration averaged around 275,000 compared with 220,000 today (see chart).
That makes intuitive sense. By our calculations emigration to the EU—which is nearly half the outflow—rose from 100,000 to 160,000 in the years between the Brexit referendum in 2016 and the ending of free movement with the EU in 2021, as people made use of a final opportunity to live on the continent. It has now fallen back.
The anglosphere draws in about 60,000 Brits a year; and the rest of the world another 55,000. All told, those leaving amount to under 0.5% of the British population, and most of them eventually return. Hardly a flood, more like a trickle. ■
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