More people everywhere - there's no escape

If UK population continues to grow at 0.6% a year, cities, towns and villages all over the country will double in size within 120 years. Tightly-packed Londoners will have to pack in another 2.26 million new arrivals, and even leafy Guildford will have to accommodate an extra 40,000 people by 2050, needing some 18,000 new homes. Political leaders cannot be surprised that voters do not like the perpetual population growth that has been thrust on them, without their consent, for more than two decades. Barely constrained growth in human numbers is fuelling internal population movement and forcing urbanisation and environmental degradation on almost all local areas of the UK. It is taking away individual freedom, quality of life and the renewable resources that individuals want and need - and there's no escape. The tables below, which use official population counts only, reveal unprecedented growth in most regions of the UK over the last 20 years, with only one region, the North East, showing a decline. These figures have been underestimated to such an extent that local governments, as well as most of the public, would like to know when it is going to stop.

UK population has grown more than 20% since 1950 and is rising by nearly 350,000 people a year. Unless this trend is reversed, only the very richest of future generations will be able to enjoy what was available to all a century ago: the space, peace, beauty and natural resources of once-plentiful countryside. For most of the inhabitants of this crowded country, the prospect is one of living at ever higher population densities, with shrinking natural resources and a deteriorating quality of life.

When will local population growth stop?

Never, unless political leaders face up to the fact that growth cannot continue, and adopt an environmentally sustainable population policy. National population projections published on 23 October 2007 showed the growth rate rising to 0.7% a year, with nearly 17 million more people expected in the UK by 2050, and projections for regions and local authority areas are likely to be revised substantially upwards.

The spoiling of England [the largest constituent country in the UK, with more than 50 million inhabitants] is a foretaste of what may happen to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as England's burgeoning population spills over into neighbouring areas, pancaking green fields with tarmac and brick. By 2007, according to the Campaign to Protect Rural England, half of England had suffered the intrusion of new development, up from barely a quarter in the 1960s. The "rich heritage, diversity and delicate beauty" of England's countryside, a place to "find peace and calm" is fast disappearing. Planning laws cannot alone solve this problem: there are already proposals to "redefine" the Green Belt to fit the three million homes to be built in England by 2020 to accommodate its growing population. (Since this policy was announced, population growth by 2020 has been upwardly revised by 2.3 million - yet another million homes.) Planning constraints are being removed by stealth, and without a policy to reverse population growth, urbanisation will continue, its concrete tendrils stifling more and more communities with emissions, congestion and noise. Yet there are still policymakers who support perpetual population growth, arguing that it can be dealt with by population redistribution. Where to, in a finite and already unsustainably crowded country?

Population redistribution is no solution

Encouraging people to move to less densely crowded areas of the UK can only be a short-term palliative if overall population continues to grow. With 16 million extra people expected by 2050, some two million already waiting for social housing or categorised as "hidden homeless", and smaller household sizes increasing the number of homes needed, the number of new homes and infrastructure to go with them could mean building another three or four Londons by mid-century.

Wherever people live and put down their ecological or carbon footprints, and almost anywhere they would prefer to move to, is getting more crowded. With London and the South East spilling their inhabitants across the rest of the country, sprawling into every corner, population has decreased only in one region, and that decrease may be invalidated by further revisions to previous official population counts. Only in North-East England (Table 1 below) has population declined, by a slim 1.2%, in the 20 years to mid-2006 - a trend unlikely to last. The relentless multiplication of climate changers and resource consumers in the UK makes local, regional and national environment targets ever harder to achieve: even mainly rural Devon has seen an increase of 82,274 people (the equivalent of a town the size of Kettering) in the last two decades, as people move out from overcrowded London and the South East. Add between one and five per cent to the 2006 population numbers in your area to take account of official undercounting, then further growth of 0.7% a year over two or three decades more - without a policy to reverse this growth, you can see just how bad it is going to get.

The local authority rebellion

Long-standing public concern about rising population is reaching boiling point. Recent growth in numbers is partly due to natural increase (more births and delayed deaths due to rising birth rates and rising life expectancy), and the birth rate has been affected by Britain's failure to tackle its teenage pregnancy rate, which is the highest in Western Europe. The main factor in UK population growth, however, is net inward migration. For a decade this issue has been ignored by environmental policymakers and economic policymakers have seen only the short-term, cheap-labour benefits to industry and the economy of importing workers to expand the working-age population.

After the census of 2001, 15 local authorities reported significant underestimating of their local populations. One high-profile case was that of Westminster, in London, where the census had undercounted the population of Westminster by some 22,000 (11%). With central government funding to local authorities based on headcounts in their areas, councils were not getting the correct funding for the extra housing, schools, waste collection and other council services needed to support their extra populations. Several have threatened to conduct their own private censuses to prove the point.

In 2007 the government belatedly began to look at the bigger picture - but only in terms of social costs. In June 2007, it launched a Migration Impacts Forum (MIF) to advise "on how migration [from Eastern Europe] affects public services and communities", and it has announced the setting up of a Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to be fully operational by April 2008: "to help set the [immigration] bar in the right place". In its consultation with eight regions of the UK, published in October 2007, MIF produced evidence of significant negative impacts from migration. Still there was no mention of the environmental impacts of overall population growth - the MIF remit was to consider only the impacts of migration on health, education, housing, crime and cohesion. MIF has no members who are professional demographers or who represent environmental organisations, and the membership of MAC is not yet known.

Notes to Table 1 above and Table 2 below: Census 2001 figures are later revisions, in light of local authority population studies (2004), Office for National Statistics (ONS). Mid-2006 Scotland population figure from General Register Office for Scotland. Mid-2006 figure for Northern Ireland from Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. All other population estimates from ONS data. GOR = Government Office Region, SHA = Strategic Health Authority. Population density figures based on 2004 land measurements: there have been no significant administrative changes in area boundaries since 1982, but some changes in land area due to geographic factors such as coastal erosion or the addition of reservoirs. Population statistical sources: Mid-2006 and Mid-2001 population estimates from Office for National Statistics: Current Releases for Supporting Information for Local Authorities for Mid-Year Population Estimates. Mid-1991 population estimates revised in light of 2001 census, Table AGG1991S, ONS. Population figures include students away from home - those in full-time education who would reside in an area if they were not living away from home in term-time.

More feet, more footprints

Rising population density is a commonsense indicator of growing pressure on the environment. Unless growing density in an area is accompanied by an equivalent reduction in polluting consumption in that area - for example, by its inhabitants switching from fossil fuel energy to renewables, higher density will yield no benefits. And unless one area's increase in density is balanced by an equivalent decrease elsewhere, the pressure can only get worse. More feet mean more footprints.

Both carbon footprinting and ecological footprinting, whatever their flaws, provide useful and more detailed snapshot measures of an area's environmental sustainability. Footprinting studies for cities and towns have been a useful guide to their sources of emissions, consumption and waste: in areas where these can be identified, for example by measuring the emissions caused by local business or transport, improvements have been achieved by changing business and transport policies.

By relating an area's impacts on the environment (the footprint) to both the global average impact and the global average share of biologically productive land, regions, cities or towns can also use footprinting techniques to work out how environmentally sustainable they are on an international scale. But few places in the UK have footprints low enough to be able to cut their impacts to the average sustainable level for the world as a whole. A 2006 survey by British Gas found that all of Britain's 23 largest cities emitted more than 4,300 kg of carbon dioxide a year per dwelling, with Reading the highest emitter at 6,189 kg a year and Greater London emitting 5,318 kg a year per dwelling. A WWF-UK Ecological Footprinting report published in October 2007 covered 60 cities. It found some benefits from high-density living: people in London "had the second lowest transport footprint in England, due to its big public transport network, low levels of car ownership and policies to discourage large polluting cars". But London ranked 44th out of 50 cities, with the average Londoner's ecological footprint (3.05) already three times the globally sustainable level. And with its population at more than 7.5 million and rising "London's total footprint is 39,500,000 gha, an area the size of Germany and Denmark combined". London's attempts to reduce its total ecological footprint are unlikely to succeed if it plans to add more than two million carbon emitters by 2050. Green policies would be better served by planning for fewer cities and smaller cities - enabled by gradual population decrease.

Footprinting and other sustainability studies for the UK, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the West Midlands, North East of England, the Isle of Wight, and other areas and cities have been carried out by Best Foot Forward, the Carbon Trust, Ecological Budget UK - WWF, Forum for the Future and individual local authorities. But footprint studies, if they ignore the population multiplier, are of little use: a town cannot permanently reduce its ecological footprint in the face of perpetual growth in the number of footprints.

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: THE ISLE OF WIGHT FOOTPRINT Some small areas have succeeded in going carbon neutral, and the Isle of Wight, an island of just 380 sq km off the south coast of Hampshire, wants to become the greenest island in Europe. In 2000, its Island State project, published by Best Foot Forward , concluded that "to be self-sufficient or bio-regionally sustainable whilst maintaining current lifestyles and technologies, the island would need to be about 2.25 times its actual size, or the population would need to reduce consumption by 56%". The island now plans to source all its energy from renewables, and as a mainly service economy driven by tourist services (which accounts for for 0.68 hectares of the 5.15 hectares per capita in Graph 1 below), with some light industry and a small agricultural sector, it does not have to reduce heavy industrial emissions. Household (population) growth therefore correlates quite closely to the total Isle of Wight footprint. Assuming no increase in the 1998/9 per capita footprint of 5.15 ha per capita, however, and with other factors unchanged, population growth from that year to mid-2006 will have increased the island's footprint by 7.2%.

OPT for an environmentally sustainable population

You don't have to accept further population growth of nearly 17 million people by 2050. You can call for a sensible UK population policy instead. For OPT Briefings on Why the UK should have a population policy and What kind of population policy should the UK have? see OPT Briefings and Submissions.