One-third of Londoners are outsiders: Report

London, Nov 14: Nearly a third of the population of London were born outside Britain, an official survey showed. The highest numbers have come from India, Bangladesh, the countries of the former Soviet Union, Ghana and Sri Lanka, the report says.

The number of people in Greater London who have come from overseas has risen by more than 6.5 Lac since Labour came to power in an unprecedented wave of migration, it found. The survey said that foreign-born population of the capital has gone up from 16.3 Lac to 22.8 Lac since 1997.

The survey says that at the same time as large numbers of new residents have arrived from abroad, the British-born population of London has been declining.

The figures from the Government's Office for National Statistics show that numbers of the native-born in London have dropped by 1.5 Lac in the past nine years, from 52.1 Lac to 50.6 Lac.

The analysis provides fresh evidence that London is showing signs of the phenomenon known as 'white flight', in which middle class families are leaving the capital to escape high housing costs, poor schools, poor transport and high crime.

'White flight' is named after the white middle class exodus from American cities in the 1950s and 60sm but in the case of London the numbers leaving include successful black and ethnic minority families looking to move to suburbs and other regions of the country.

The latest figures on Londoners born abroad are based on the Labour Force Survey, a regular ONS exercise which gathers information from 53,000 homes. Some 5,000 of these are in London.

As with almost all Government attempts to count population at the moment, its findings are open to doubt. For example, it puts the number of Polish-born people in London at 70,000, a figure far lower than could be expected from other Government estimates that 6 Lac people have come in from Eastern Europe over the past three years.

Figures published by the ONS in the summer showed that non-whites now make up 33.5 per cent of the population of London compared with 29 per cent in 2001.

UNI