This is only one way of looking at it though. I don’t want a growing population in the UK. There are already too many people living on this island. Having a larger population who can pay more tax is far outstripped by many other factors.
With the current population size, the UK barely covers electricity demand in the Winter as it is. Plus, it’s estimated that our current water industry will not be able to cover the demand for water required by the growing population by the 2030s.
Are there any initiatives or investment planned to combat this and keep us serviceable for electricity and water with the surges in immigration and ever increasing population?
And even if there are, will these then have a knock-on effect of increasing pollution which is already a massive problem?
Our current cities are heaving. Traffic and the amount of pollution that comes from it, is at dangerous levels. Greater Manchester has some of the most polluted air in Europe; Nitrogen Dioxide levels from motor vehicles in Greater Manchester already significantly exceed World Health Organisation guidelines. Air pollution contributes to 1,200 annual early deaths in Greater Manchester. 1 in 20 of GtrMcr adult deaths are linked to air pollution.
A growing population through immigration of unskilled people, means there’s a surplus unskilled workforce. Unskilled jobs have ridiculous amounts of applicants for every 1 job on offer. Plus skilled jobs are being applied for by people without the required skills or there aren’t enough applicants to fill the vacant skilled jobs. Industries like Tech in Manchester are facing huge shortages in a skilled workforce. The right people are not coming into this country. The plan around who comes in is very poor.
In July 2025, there were 718,000 vacant jobs in the UK, with around ⅓ of them being in the skilled sector. At the same time, there were 1.67m unemployed people in the UK, but with a massive skills shortage within that figure.
This shows that we have a surplus population of unskilled workers, and we do not need to increase the population and immigration. What we need more than anything is to create skills course qualifications for the current population so that employment balances out properly.
Housing in existing cities is poor and insufficient. There aren’t enough homes and, where homes are vacant, the state of them can be appalling and you wouldn’t use them for keeping farm animals, never mind human families with children. There are too many rogue landlords taking advantage of tenants. There are also instances of double the amount of people living in homes than they are supposed to house in inner-city areas.
Current towns and cities, especially Manchester, feel overpopulated. There’s been a net increased population of Manchester Salford Trafford Stockport Tameside and Oldham who’ve arrived in this country in just the last two years. Yet, there are no new cities being built and existing cities are not increasing at that rate. In existing cities, everywhere is extremely busy all the time. If there were plans to develop places like Carlisle, Dundee, Ipswich, Bangor, Plymouth etc. into 2million population cities with mass house building programmes, which would allow for an increase in housing the population and employment for a large unskilled workforce in unskilled jobs across these newly-larger cities, fair enough. But there isn’t. The govt aim to build 300,000 new homes a year yet that will still fall short of demand for the population size there is currently, never mind a larger population.
Plus even if new cities were built or small cities became big cities, it still wouldn’t help with the need to generate the required electricity and water - and food - demand for more people because it’s not there. And, even if everything was in place for it, pollution would still be made worse.
Also, building new cities and increasing the the size of existing cities means that we would lose green belt land, farming land (which has further knock-on effects of not producing enough food for the increasing population and increases of imports which means extra cost), and we would lose parts of our beautiful countryside.
None of this is a good thing.
An increasing population puts further demand on our already struggling public services.
Crime has significantly increased. A decade ago, the Police in England and Wales recorded around 4m annual crimes committed. There’s been a steady increase in that time and in recent years it’s not been below 6.5m. Population increases will see an increase in crime. Why should people have to put up with that as a side effect of increasing the population? It’s not something people want.
Plus with this, the less likely the general population are to get required help from the Police, because they are too busy with the amount of crime being committed in general.
I live on a complex of apartment blocks with balconies, with the ground floor flats having a veranda-type bottom floor ‘balcony’ that can be accessed easily from the gardens of the complex. A few Summers ago, we had issues with some youths stealing items from and vandalising the ground floor verandas. When the Police were called, they pretty much admitted (without properly admitting it) that it wasn’t serious enough for them to spend time investigating because they had too many other more serious crimes to investigate. They said to contact them again if anyone was in danger.
The UK is one of the most unhealthy countries in Europe (granted, that is mainly due to poor lifestyles and diets). The strain on the NHS is huge, to the point that the NHS cannot cope with a 69m population it has now, never mind how it would cope with an increasing population.
Hospitals are overbombarded with the numbers they can cope with. New hospitals are not being built at the rate of increasing in- and outpatient numbers, but even if they were, we are not seeing the amount of doctors required to be employed in them from the unskilled immigrant population.
There are also far too many issues with an ever polarised and disunited nation with increased immigration. And it seriously is not just an issue with far right bigots, even if the rise of the far-right directly naturally correlates with increased immigration. Every-day, normal, fair-minded people with no extreme views are seeing ever increasing issues with ever increasing immigration.
Many inner-city areas have just become immigrant dumping zones. This sees the existing population feel grievances with the state that these areas become. Small things like some, if not all, the pubs and social clubs shutting in these areas means that social spaces for existing populations decrease or disappear. Pubs and social clubs are often the heartbeat of communities, as places of social communion, sports teams and events. British culture suffers without them and in many places with high immigration, there are no pubs left. The types of businesses in these areas change to cater more for the immigrant population as well; from clothing to food to faith-based sector businesses and charities.
The existing population in these areas, and not just the far-right bigots amongst them, naturally tend to end up relocating from these areas because of accumulations of things like this happening. And you never hear of people wanting to move to these areas. This then creates segregation within our towns and cities, which makes integration into British culture more difficult for concentrated immigrant areas.
Immigrants being housed in hotels means that the existing local population lose their local place where work meetings, work training, Christmas parties, wakes, 21sts, 50ths, school proms, university balls, dance clubs, fitness clubs, wedding receptions, or have friends+family who people don’t have room for in their homes but come to visit for a weekend/week to just stay in while visiting etc. at these hotels which they were built for and were used for previously, cannot happen anymore. People place large emphasis on the memories at places like this. Yet they’re not there for the local populations anymore. They’ve been taken away from existing communities and their grievances with that mostly have nothing to do with who’s there and nothing to do with being right wing, but simply that another community hub is taken away from the community.
The roads are a mess, road networks in cities can’t cope with the amount of vehicles on the roads, transport is a mess, schools can’t offer places for the amount of children there are in the country (300,000 children are not on role at a school), white working class children (especially boys) are being left behind in school performance, wages are kept suppressed, poverty is high, the gap between rich and poor is at an all-time high, pollution is at dangerous levels, the job market is all over the shop, public services cannot cope, housing is in crisis, crime is ever increasing, social cohesion is collapsing and getting ever more polarised, racial segregation is becoming facet of our communities… all because of an increase in the population and immigration.
There’s no way that there are more positives than negatives to having a larger population and further immigration.
What we need to do is change the way the country runs, rather than just think it should come from increasing immigration:
- make our economy more diverse internally by increasing British-made products across a spread industries, making our economy better from within, digging into the current non-working existing population and training+employing some of them into these industries;
- create initiatives to help small businesses to start up and grow so there’s more money coming into the country through tax from successful businesses, rather than increase business rates to a smaller business sector that they cannot afford to pay and thus have to close down, and rather than just hope to raise more tax by increasing the population through immigration;
- ideas like the nationalisation of all our public services and make them free to access at the usual point-of-payment (from transport to home utilities to broadband) then reform tax so that people pay more income tax but have fewer outgoings after monthly deductions. From this every single person pays from their income, but the less well-off are paying less/nothing at usual point of payment for all services where it would usually pinch them most;
- reduce immigration and remove those who shouldn’t be here so fewer people are accessing our struggling services and there is less pollution;
- invest in a serious, committed and long-term healthy lives initiative so that the population improve their lifestyles and diets, and thus their health, so that the NHS is put under far less pressure. With this there would be less of a requirement for immigtants needed to come and work in the NHS because it wouldn’t be overstretched;
- target skill shortages and initiate training programmes in those sectors for the current population, rather than just increase immigration in the hope that there’s a percentage of them who might by chance have the skills required;
- increase wages to a smaller but more skilled workforce;
- make big corporations pay tax fairly like everyone else has to, and make them pay better wages…
In 2010 there was a study done by the Migration Observatory that said that an ideal UK population size would be between 30-60m for the infrastructure we had and planned to have. Yet, we’re now at 69m and by the 2040s the current rate of increase would see a 77m population. This is a massive ‘NO!’ for me. We are not ready for it, we are already not coping.
