Coronavirus has sparked an exodus of immigrants from the UK and what is likely to be the largest fall in Britain's population since the second world war, according to a statistical analysis of official data.

A blog, published on Thursday by the government-funded Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE), estimated that up to 1.3m people born abroad left the UK between the third quarter of 2019 and the same period in 2020.

In London alone, almost 700,000 foreign-born residents have probably moved out, the authors of the blog calculated, leading to a potential 8 per cent drop in the capital's population last year.