Population Growth at 47 Year High

The upshot of this is that although net migration appears to be falling over 24% of all live births in the UK are now to women who were born elsewhere:

An immigrant baby boom is fuelling Britain's fastest population growth in half a century.

The number of people in the UK has passed 61million for the first time, figures showed yesterday.

Record immigration levels over the past decade have driven up the number of women of childbearing age.

This helped boost the number of births last year to 791,000 - up 33,000 on 2007.

For the first time in a decade, the excess of births over deaths played a bigger role than immigration itself in driving population growth, which is now twice as fast as in the 1990s.

The figures from the Office for National Statistics show that net immigration - the balance of those arriving over those leaving - fell by 44 per cent between 2007 and 2008 as economic turmoil triggered an exodus of foreign workers.

The figures have been used by Immigration Minister Phil Woolas to claim Britain's border policies are working - but all hey really mean is that less people are emigrating as well as immigrating, because of the financial crisis.

It is Labour's disastrous immigration policies which are largely responsible for foreign mothers making up such a large part of the demographic.