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Exodus as young workers flee high-tax Britain - THE TELEGRAPH
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Young workers are fleeing Labour’s high-tax Britain, with under-35s leading a near-record exodus.
A net 110,000 British people aged 16 to 34 emigrated in the year to March, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), accounting for two thirds of all departing Britons.
The ONS has broken down its migration data by age for the first time, revealing how Britain’s ageing society is haemorrhaging young people while older expats are returning home.
The figures will fuel claims that Rachel Reeves’s record tax rises have made Britain unattractive to the young and aspirant.
Increases to National Insurance and the minimum wage have driven up the cost of hiring, leading to a slump in graduate jobs and warnings that those in the early stages of their careers are being priced out of the employment market.
The youth unemployment rate is 15pc, a decade-high excluding the pandemic, with more than 700,000 out of work.
Following the Budget, young people will now also face stiffer repayments on university student loans, potentially higher rents and will pay tax on their incomes sooner.
Some 87,000 young adults aged 16 to 24 left the country in the 12 months to March, according to the ONS, while 87,000 aged 25 to 34 departed. Across these age groups, 63,000 Britons returned from overseas during the same period.
Among Britons aged 35 to 44, net emigration was 15,000 in the year to June.
Older Britons returned to the UK in greater numbers than they left. There was net inward migration of 7,000 Britons aged 55 to 64, and 11,000 for the over-65s.
This means almost all the country’s net loss of 112,000 Britons was concentrated in the under-35s.
Young people may be taking advantage of more liberal rules in some European countries or the Middle East, where visa categories allow for remote working.
“Speaking to immigration lawyers, what was keeping them busy was people working remotely in countries where they didn’t have immigration permission to do so,” said Madeleine Sumption, the director of Oxford University’s Migration Observatory.
More young people are likely to enter the income tax net sooner following the Budget, which has frozen the personal allowance at £12,570.
The threshold at which student loans must be paid back has also been frozen, meaning that the tax authorities will seek repayments sooner.
The minimum wage for under-21s is getting a boost, but it may deter employers from hiring workers as they become more expensive.
Ms Sumption said the exodus figures would include naturalised Britons, who may have come to the UK as part of EU free movement, gained British citizenship and had now returned to their home countries.
The data would also cover a proportion of Britons who had quit the UK but had then decided not to return and put down roots overseas.
Young Britons are flocking to Australia, where the youth unemployment rate is under 10pc. Britons were the fastest-growing nationality of people taking up working holiday visas to Australia in 2024-25, increasing 80pc from a year earlier.
The exodus casts a pall over what would otherwise be welcome news for the Government, with total net migration across all nationalities falling to 204,000 in the year ending June 2025, down from 649,000 last year.
This figure is the lowest since the year ending March 2021 and just higher than year ending December 2019 – the last figure released before pandemic disrupted international migration.
It marks a decisive end to the “Boriswave”, which saw net migration of almost a million in a single year at its peak.
More EU citizens left than arrived last year, ONS data showed, but net migration for non-EU people still stood at 383,000.
Figures broken down by nationality for the first time show that many EU nationals are increasingly returning home, attracted by faster economic growth and lower jobless rates in their origin countries.
Some 37,000 Romanians with settled status left the country in the year to June, whilst just 14,000 came back in. Similarly, 25,000 Poles left, with just 7,000 immigrating returnees.
The largest group of net migrants across all nationalities was men aged 16 to 24, with a net migration figure of 102,000, compared with 78,000 for young women. Many arrived to study, masking the exodus among specifically British youth.
