Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, with reference to page 60 of background briefing notes to the Queen's Speech 2015, what estimate he has made of the number of (a) British citizens living overseas for more than 15 years in the (i) EU and (ii) rest of the world and (b) EU citizens resident in the UK who will not be eligible to vote in the upcoming European Union referendum.

There are a number of different reports and figures available on the number of British nationals living abroad and EU nationals living in the UK. These will vary depending on source, methodology and the point in time to which the figures relate. The figure which the Government believes is most accurate is from the World Bank’s “Estimates of Migrant Stocks in 2010” as updated by the UN Department for Social and Economic Affairs in 2013: http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/estimates2/estimatesorigin.shtml

This report estimates that there were approximately 5.2 million British born migrants living overseas, of which approximately 1.3 million were in other EU countries. The same report estimated that there were 2.7 million EU born migrants resident in the UK. We do not have any figures distinguishing between British citizens living overseas for more or less than 15 years.