London, May 20 (ANI): Two million British citizens have left the UK in the last decade, and new figures suggest that this is the greatest exodus from the country in almost a century.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) will release figures showing that more than 200,000 Britons emigrated during 2006. That will take the total number who left the country between 1997 and 2006 to 1.97 million.
Another 1.58 million foreign nationals resident in Britain left during the same period. However, 3.9 million foreigners arrived over the decade, including more than 500,000 in 2006, reports The Telegraph.
The body will publish the raft of immigration figures on Tuesday, as MPs prepare to dismiss the national statisticians' data as "not fit for purpose" and demand an overhaul of the way population movements are measured.
According to figures compiled by Jay Winter, of Yale University, the last comparable exodus came between 1911 and 1914, when 2.4 million people left Britain.
The other significant spike in emigration came in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when thousands of Britons left to start new lives in Australia, Canada and the United States.
The Institute for Public Policy Research, a think-tank, has estimated that there are more than 5.5 million British citizens living abroad. (ANI)
