UK ‘to lead the world in diversity’

The proportion of minority groups living in the UK will increase from 10 per cent in 2006 to 40 per cent by 2050, the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford said.

Professor David Coleman said if current trends continue, the so-called majority-ethnic group in the UK – white British – will become a minority before 2070.

He added that this assumption does not factor in the impact of current or future government attempts to reduce net migration.

In his briefing, Prof Coleman said: “Migration has become the primary driver of demographic change in most high-income countries and may remain so.

“On current trends European populations will become more ethnically diverse, with the possibility that today’s majority ethnic groups will no longer comprise a numerical majority in some countries.”

In England and Wales, censuses show that in 1841 just 0.25 per cent of the population was “foreign-born”, rising to 4.4 per cent in 1951. By 2010/11, in the whole of the UK, immigrants made up 13 per cent of the population.

Prof Coleman said part of the reason behind the decline in white-British members of the population is declining birth rates.

He said: “The continuation of these trends in low-fertility countries would eventually lead to the majority ethnic group becoming a numerical minority of the national population.”

The professor said the UK has the highest migration projection and the point at which the country’s ethnic minority population overtakes the majority at about 2070.

However, he added that this would occur in younger age-groups and major urban areas earlier.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman and founder of campaign group Migration Watch UK, said: “This is a stunning report.

“It brings home the enormous impact on our society of the mass immigration triggered by the Labour government.

“We now have the huge task of integrating nearly four million new immigrants.

“The first step must surely be to get the numbers back under control, as the Government are attempting to do.”

Half the 7.5m people currently living in England and Wales who were born abroad arrived between 2001 and 2011 according to data from the 2011 Census.

The top five countries of birth were India, Poland, Pakistan, Ireland and Germany, marking a departure from the make-up of the population at the time of the last census a decade earlier, when Poland was not in the top 10.

The largest increase in ethnic group over the last 10 years was seen in the “white: other” category, which rose by 1.1m to 2.5m.

This reflects more than half a million Poles who migrated to England and Wales during these years according to the Office for National Statistics, which published the statistics in December.

The figures also show 4.8m people in the UK now hold non-UK passports. Of these, 2.3m have EU passports.

Most people in England and Wales belong to the white ethnic group (86 per cent) – a fall of 5 per cent since 2001.

There was also a decline in the number of people describing themselves as white British, which fell by 400,000. This group now makes up 80 per cent of the population, compared with 87 per cent in 2001.

And there was an increase of nearly 600,000 in the number of people classifying themselves as of mixed ethnicity to more than 1.2m in 2011.