Over million Britons leave home since Millennium 03/11/2006 00:00

3 November 2006

LONDON — More than a million Britons have left the country to lead new lives abroad since the turn of the Millennium, new figures showed.

The number of British citizens who emigrate each year has gone up by more than a third since the mid-1990s.

And while more and more people are leaving to live in Spain, France, Australia or America, fewer Britons are coming back from abroad to live at home than at any time in a decade, the Daily Mail newspaper reported.

The British Office for National Statistics said for the second year running around 200,000 Britons left the country.

The total going abroad to live was 380,000 including 198,000 UK citizens.

Numbers of Britons emigrating now compare with just under 150,000 in 1997, a level that held steady throughout the 1990s.

But the emigration boom since the turn of the Millennium shows that, by the official count, 1.1 million Britons have left the country in six years while fewer than 600,000 have returned from abroad - an overall loss of around half a million British citizens.

The figures from the ONS do not record where emigrants were going.

But a count of British passport holders abroad issued by the Foreign Office earlier this year indicated that the most popular destinations in Europe were Spain and France.

Half a million Britons live in the US and more than 600,000 people in Australia hold UK passports.

The wave of emigration is rising as numbers of migrants coming in remain at historic levels.

[Copyright EFE with Expatica]

Subject: Spanish news