The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Government’s fiscal watchdog, warned last month that deaths were expected to consistently outnumber births in Britain from the middle of the next decade.
The OBR expects the population of people born in Britain to start declining steadily from 2035, a turning point that will leave the UK dependent on migration to support the economy.
Nationally, the birth rate has halved from three per woman in the 1960s to 1.5 in 2022, far below the rate of 2.1 needed to keep the population stable.
Karl Williams, research director at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), warned that relying on immigration created its own “acute financial pressures”.
Mr Williams said: “Population growth at that speed means a lot of pressure going on to the housing market, public services and infrastructure in a short space of time.
“The key thing to remember is that actually, under the new immigration system, only about 12pc of visas have gone to people in the skilled-workers group.
“Therefore it’s a relatively small number of people who are creating the economic activity and tax revenues that offset the negative impact of such rapid population growth.”
A large chunk of the net migration numbers are people who have come to the UK on humanitarian routes from Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria and Hong Kong, as well as students and dependents, Mr Williams said.
Underneath the ONS’s headline figures for the UK as a whole, there was significant variation between the different nations.