Statistics Wales Demography newsletter: June 2023

On 20 April, the Welsh Government published a statistical headline about electoral roll statistics for Wales for 2022.

Electoral statistics are annual counts of the number of people who are registered on electoral registers, and so entitled to vote. Electoral roll statistics for UK Parliamentary and local government elections for the UK (Office for National Statistics) (ONS)).

The ONS has noted that these statistics do not reflect the changes to eligibility criteria for Senedd and local government elections in Wales since 2020. Consequently, local government electoral registrations for 16 year olds and 15 year old attainers, in Wales, are missing from these statistics. As a result of this we have not published Senedd and local government electors in Wales and have been unable to update our StatsWales tables.

Main points

• The total number of UK parliamentary electors registered to vote as at 1 December 2022 in Wales is 2,304,700.
• This is a decrease of 0.1% between 1 December 2021 and 1 December 2022, and a decrease of 0.8% from the peak on 2 March 2020.
• The total number of UK parliamentary electors registered to vote in the UK as a whole fell by 0.2% between 1 December 2021 and 1 December 2022.

The ONS has continued its analysis of Census 2021 data. This includes the published analysis of:

• short-term international migration (ONS)
• the international student population (ONS)
• the older population (ONS)
• people with a second address (ONS)
• families (ONS)
• marriages (ONS)
• families and households in the UK (ONS)
• household characteristics by tenure and subnational geographies (ONS)
• population and migration statistics, who should we count? (ONS)

Upcoming publications include:

• estimates of the very old including centenarians (ONS) (May to June)
• understanding international migration over the decade 2011-2021

On 25 May, the ONS released experimental and provisional estimates of UK international migration. These estimates covered the period of year ending June 2020 to year ending December 2022.

Main points

• Total long-term immigration was estimated at around 1.2 million in 2022, and emigration was 557,000, which means migration continues to add to the population with net migration at 606,000; most people arriving to the UK in 2022 were non-EU nationals (925,000), followed by EU (151,000) and British (88,000).
• People coming to the UK from non-EU countries for work, study, and for humanitarian purposes, including unique events such as those arriving from Ukraine and Hong Kong, have contributed towards relatively high levels of immigration over the past 18 months; however, growth has slowed over recent quarters, potentially demonstrating the temporary nature of these impacts.
• The composition of non-EU immigration changed in 2022, with 39% of people arriving for study related reasons, down from 47% in 2021; those arriving on humanitarian routes (including Ukrainian schemes) increased from 9% to 19% over the same period. 
• Evidence suggests that students typically stay for shorter periods than other migrants and that the majority leave at the end of their study; the latest data shows that those who arrived for study reasons in 2021 are now starting to leave, driving an increase in total emigration from 454,000 in 2021 to 557,000 in 2022.
• Both a slowing of immigration and rising of emigration means that levels of net migration have levelled off in recent quarters; an estimated 606,000 more people arrived long-term to the UK than departed in YE December 2022, 118,000 higher than a year previously, but similar to levels in YE June 2022.

The ONS has also published an update on international migration research.

On 22 May, the ONS published its response to the user engagement exercise on a new mortality projection methodology (ONS) for the national population projections. It took place from 9 January to 20 February 2023 and was part of their strategy to continuously review and improve their methods.

Due to quality issues in some of the data used for the internal migration component, the mid-2022 population estimates for Wales and for England will be published in September rather than June/July. The ONS has also announced that it will publish rebased mid-year estimates of the population for the period mid-2012 to mid-2020 in September, to take account of estimates from Census 2021.

Revised mid-2021 population estimates for the UK will also be published in September, while population estimates from the Dynamic Population Model for Wales and for England are planned for June. For more information, see provisional plans for publishing the latest population and migration estimates (ONS).

On 28 March, the ONS published a flexible table builder for Census 2021 data, also known as the Create a custom dataset tool (ONS).

For the first time, this allows users to look for interactions between topics which are important to them and build their own datasets. The ONS has published a blog to accompany this tool, which includes a short video explaining how to create your own custom datasets.

For information on Welsh language statistics, please see the Statistics Wales quarterly update.

Martin Parry

Telephone: 0300 025 0373

Email: stats.popcensus@gov.wales

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