Asked by: Earl of Courtown (Conservative - Excepted Hereditary)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many British citizens currently live abroad and in which countries.
Answered by Lord Taylor of Holbeach
The World Bank's ‘Bilateral Estimates of Migrant Stocks in 2010' provides an estimate for the number of British born migrants residing in other countries.
According to these estimates, there are approximately 4.7 million British born migrants living abroad.
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPROSPECTS/Resources/334934-1110315015165/T
1.Estimates_of_Migrant_Stocks_2010.xls
The United Nations (UN) Department for Social and Economic Affairs updated this table for 2013. The UN's ‘Trends in International Migrant Stock: Migrants by Destination and Origin' suggests that around 5.0 million British born migrants
are residing overseas.
http://esa.un.org/unmigration/data/subsheets/UN_MigrantStockByOriginAndDestination_2013T10.xls
The table below provides the top twenty countries by number of resident UK born migrants according to the World Bank 2010 and UN 2013 datasets.
There are known gaps in the estimates produced by both the World Bank and the UN, so the lists of countries drawn from their respective databases may not be complete and may not be directly comparable (see attached table).