The Editor

The Times

5 August 2020.

Dear Sir,

The position on population growth is even more dire than Clair Foges portrays. Officially projected population growth depends on assumed net migration of 190,000 per year, invariably under-estimated. The actual average over the last five years was 260,000. If continued that would take UK population close to 70 million next year and nearly 80 million by 2040. In the official projection, 79% of growth from 2018 is due to immigration and the children of immigrants. In fact we are already there; that has been the case for the last twenty years. That is the driver of household growth; over 60 percent of additional households each year have a ‘head’ born outside the UK. Who knows what will happen next with Brexit, Covid and all the rest. But the government’s migration policy takes the safety catches off immigration despite our housing problems, the imminent threat of mass unemployment and the long term challenge to the future of (human) work. There seems to be no concern for anything the demands of employers, and no grasp that the future might be seriously different from the present.

Yours faithfully,

David Coleman