Revealed, the towns and cities where most babies are born to mothers from abroad

More than half of all births in eight cities and towns in the UK are to mothers from abroad after two decades of mass immigration, a study has found.

The report, by think tank Migration Watch UK, showed that in London alone, the population has increased by 1.8 million since 2001 to stand at about nine million.

It means 57 per cent of live births in the capital are to non-UK mothers, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics.

The figure was 42 per cent in Birmingham, the UK’s second biggest city, and 50 per cent in Manchester, the third largest city.

The highest proportion was in Slough at 62 per cent, followed by Luton (58 per cent), Cambridge (57 per cent), Leicester (56 per cent), Oxford (53 per cent), and Watford (52 per cent).

The Migration Watch report said the data had significant implications for integration, particularly as the children reached school age.

It warned there were likely to be significant disparities between areas, with the risk of communities becoming segregated from each other. 

The think tank cited evidence from Baroness Casey’s 2016 integration audit, in which pupils at one school believed that the population of Britain was between 50 to 90 per cent Asian, such had been their experience up to that point.

While just 12 per cent of pupils in state schools in the north-east of England are from ethnic minorities, the figure is 38 per cent in the West Midlands and 80 per cent in inner London.   

According to Baroness Casey’s report: “As the diversity of the nation has increased ... people from minority groups have become both more dispersed and in some cases more concentrated and segregated.”  

The paper warned that, if high levels of immigration continued at the pace and scale since 2001, there was “an increasing potential for the shared understandings that have long undergirded British life to weaken further.” Net migration rose from 80,000 a year in 1980-2000 to 300,000 a year after 2001.

Alp Mehmet, the chairman of Migration Watch, said: “The rapidly changing nature of our towns and cities poses serious risks for integration and will be a real concern to many in this country.  

“This is not inevitable. We can and must reduce the scale of immigration very considerably if social harmony is to be preserved. We shall be putting forward proposals for achieving this.”