To the Future 2018

The paper, 'Mapping EU citizens in the UK: A changing profile?', published today by the University of Birmingham's Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS), finds that at the time of the Brexit referendum, EU-born UK residents, who overall accounted for 5% of the UK population, comprised between 0.7% and 25.8% of the resident population in local areas, with geographical distribution concentrated around London, the South East, and the East. Over forty years of EU membership, Britain has seen the population of resident EU nationals rising from 1.8% in 1981 to roughly 5% at the time of the EU referendum in 2016, an analysis based on forty years of UK data reveals. The Eurochildren report uses official statistics to provide a historical overview of EU nationals in the UK since the early 1980s until the period around the EU Referendum in June 2016, focussing on the national picture as well as lower geographical areas. The report shows that, from 1981 to 2001, the share of EC/EU nationals within the population and their geographical location remained relatively stable, with about a third living in/around London. The major change to the magnitude and distribution of EU nationals in the UK came after the 2004 Accession of New Member States (e.g. Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Cyprus, and Malta). The report reveals this change was unevenly distributed among local areas.