The sense of glee was palpable yesterday in the Daily Telegraph’s reporting that London’s population fell last year for the first time since the pandemic. Office for National Statistics mid-year estimates for 2025 suggested a fall of around 27,000 people, resulting in a total population just over 9.1 million.
Conservative London Assembly member and former mayoral candidate Susan Hall was quick to lay the blame at Sir Sadiq Khan’s door, describing the fall as an “indictment” of him and proof that he has “failed the city”. But a close look at the mid-year estimates data suggests the bulk of the blame may lie elsewhere.
London’s population change was, as ever, composed of three trends: positive natural change (more births than deaths), negative net internal migration (more people leaving for other parts of the UK than arriving from them) and positive net international migration (more people arriving from outside the UK than moving overseas).
The first two have been heading down for some time (as the graph below shows), but the overwhelming shift last year was a second sharp fall in net international migration. In 2023, during the height of the post-pandemic “Boris-wave” of immigration, 235,000 more people arrived in London from overseas than moved the other way. In 2025, this number fell sharply to just 52,000 – the lowest level since 2020, and around 45 per cent lower than the 2010s average.
This fall in international migration, the result of both fewer arrivals and more departures than in recent years, is not an accident or the result of the Mayor’s actions or inactions. It is the intended result of policies brought in by the last Conservative government and intensified by Labour, to bring down immigration. Salary thresholds have been raised, social worker visas have been cut back and stricter limits have been placed on the ability of family members to join people working or studying in the UK. Migration Observatory research reports a 78 per cent fall in skilled worker visas issued across the UK in 2025 compared to two years earlier.
Such restrictions on international migration inevitably hit an international city like London particularly hard. When they are coupled with an atmosphere of hostility to immigrants in the UK, and by the mendacious propaganda about London’s supposed lawlessness put about by the UK’s enemies, it is hardly a surprise that fewer people are choosing to come to or stay in London than in previous decades.
That is not to say that there are not more localised problems too. Though estimated arrivals from the rest of the UK reached a historic high in 2025, these were outstripped by the highest level of departures since 2021. Net internal migration out of London has been level since 2022, but is twice as high as it was ten years ago. And the number of births has also been falling consistently, slightly faster in London than in England as a whole. There is no doubt that London’s housing costs and challenging jobs market play a part in making it tough to stay and raise a family in the capital.
But London’s population decline is largely the result of a political choice on immigration. To quote Public Image Limited, “This is what you want…this is what you get!” Or, perhaps more accurately, given attitudes to Brexit and immigration, in the capital, ‘This is what they want…this is what we get.”
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