Population forecasts
Research & Evaluation produce the
corporate population forecasts for Kent County Council to inform
Members, Officers and the public, on future population growth in
Kent.
We have developed three “self-service”
toolkits for the user to extract forecasts for Kent as a whole or
for individual Kent districts for any timeframe between 2010 and
2026.
All forecasts are based on KCC’s latest
housing-led Strategy Forecast (Oct 2011), that means it takes
account of the distribution of future housing across the county
rather than being a projection based on past trends such as that
which the Office for National Statistics produce.
Central Government population
projections
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also
produces population projections for all districts, counties and
regions in England. The ONS projections do not take account
of future house building programs. Instead they look at past
population trends of migration, fertility and mortality and assume
that these will continue indefinitely into the future. Past
trends may be disrupted by future growth policy changes. For
this reason KCC prefer to use their own in-house strategy-based
forecasts which do take account of future house building as they
are felt to give a better reflection of how the population of an
area is likely to change in the future. However, despite the
weakness with the ONS population projections, they are the only
data set to provide a national projection. For this reason if
we want to compare Kent's future population growth alongside the
national average, or other areas within England, the ONS Sub
National Population Projections are used. The
2010 Sub National Population Projections for Kent (PDF,
438k) bulletin compares Kent's population growth alongside
the regional and national average and shows that Kent's population
is projected to grow faster and age faster.
More detailed information is available upon request by
contacting research@kent.gov.uk