A recent report has analysed that London’s population is expected to decline for the first time in more than 30 years. Combined with economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, immigration and Brexit, the city can see a massive drop in the number of people currently living there.
According to the accountancy firm PwC, the number of people living in the capital could fall by more than 300,000 this year, from a record level of about 9 million in 2020, to as low as 8.7 million. This would end decades of growth with the first annual drop since 1988. The forecast arrives at a time when the city and town centres have been a ghost front with the Chancellor Rishi Sunak recently stressing that he is “desperate” for these centres to revive and re-open. A boom in work from home culture during the pandemic has also encouraged growing numbers of people to consider moving elsewhere.
Other drivers include a smaller number of graduates moving to London with international students remaining sceptical of pursuing their academic career in the UK amid the discovery of a new strain of the virus. Fewer job opportunities in the capital and lower international migration to the city as a result of the pandemic and Brexit have also contributed significantly. Net EU migration to the UK as a whole has fallen since the 2016 Brexit vote, and could turn negative in 2021 – meaning more people leave the UK for the EU than arrive from it – for the first time since the early 1990s, according to PwC forecasts.
Commenting on the subject, Hannah Audino, an economist at PwC, said a sustained decline in London’s population would have wide-ranging consequences for the capital’s economy, house prices and transport network, but that it was too early to know for certain whether Covid-19 and Brexit would have a long-term impact.
She said, “It depends on the extent to which remote working truly does become the new normal into the long term. A lot of people really miss the office environment, so once social distancing measures are fully history, in five to 10 years’ time, maybe people will go back more to city living,”
