The number of foreigners settling in one part of Lincolnshire over the past five years is three times higher than earlier estimates, according to revised calculations, while the number of new arrivals in parts of east London, Herefordshire and even Aylesbury has doubled.
Overall the population of London has risen by 16 per cent, or almost 130,000 extra people, as a result of changes made by the Office for National Statistics.
But some councils, including Cambridge, Norwich and Durham, have “lost” up to half of their immigrant communities in the move, prompting fears that they will also lose funding to run public services from central Government as a result.
The number of foreign-born people coming to live, study or work in Britain is currently only based on a voluntary questionnaire carried out at ports and airports, while detailed estimates of where new arrivals settle have been calculated in different ways.
Under the ONS’s latest methodology, published this week by the Greater London Authority, migrants were separated into “streams” depending on if they are workers, students or children, then their movements across the country were tracked using health, education and welfare registers.
Overall, the estimated number of immigrants arriving for more than a year between 2006 and 2010 fell by 0.4 per cent, to 2.52m under the revised calculations.
But the numbers settling in London rose by 16 per cent to reach 942,800.
Across the country, the biggest rise was seen in Boston, where the number of recent migrants increases by 218 per cent to 7,500 over five years. In 2008, a Labour minister claimed that Eastern European's made up a quarter of the town's residents.
Newham (102 per cent), Herefordshire (108 per cent) and Aylesbury Vale (104 per cent) also record sharp rises.
But in Norwich the estimated number of recent immigrants fell by 52 per cent, to 10,900, with similar drops in Cambridge (51 per cent) and Durham (45 per cent).
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migration Watch UK, said: "The impact of immigration on London has been revised up by 130,000 to very nearly one million in just five years.
"This is a measure of the huge churn in our population as a result of mass immigration which has serious consequences for our schools, housing and health services."
