Wales’ real immigration crisis
We need to talk about our challenges through facts, not rhetoric
Reporting by Ryan O’Neill and Will Hayward
“Immigration is putting an intolerable strain on our public services”
The above statement has been the relentless message from certain parts of our politics for a long time.
And it is easy to see why this chimes with a lot of people. You would have to be living under a rock to fail to notice that public services in Wales are in a really tough spot.
We have been looking at the challenges facing Wales’ public services and, in some places, you can indeed make the argument that the migration of people is making things harder for Cymru’s beleaguered local authorities.
But it’s not the immigration Nigel Farage is talking about.
We have examined the data and spoken to those people charged with delivering education and social care in Wales. It seems that when you look at the issue in depth, in some parts of Wales it is internal migration (those who move within the UK) that is having a much more significant impact than refugees in boats.
More specifically, it is the movements of older people that are putting particular strain on Cymru – especially those who are moving to Wales to retire.
A disclaimer
Before we go any further we need to be very clear, this is not about blaming older people or in any way suggesting that people in other parts of the UK don’t have every right to retire wherever they like. They absolutely do.
People moving to Wales to retire is also far from the biggest reason why public services are struggling. Even without relocating retirees, Wales would still have an aging population problem.
But it would also be remiss not to point out the very real impact that people choosing Cymru as their retirement destination is having. In many places it is demonstrably more of a problem than supporting refugees (if indeed either are really a “problem” at all).
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The reality - who is moving to Wales?
The ONS publishes stats every year on internal migration within different parts of the UK.
In the year to June 2024, net internal migration for Wales was 4,797. In total, 74,865 people moved into Wales, compared to 70,068 who left.
About 98% of those moving in came from England.
Around 6.5% of those people are aged 65 and over. If you include 60 to 64-year-olds (who may have taken early retirement), it rises to 10%.
The ONS data splits England and Wales into regions which are:
Wales
the south west
south east
the east
the east midlands
north east
Yorkshire and the Humber
west midlands
the north west
London.
The only area that ranks above Wales for over-65s arriving is the south west of England (7.6%). No surprise really – this area includes some of the UK’s most popular retirement destinations like Cornwall, Devon and Dorset.
But they also break the data down by local authority. This is where it gets really interesting for Wales.
The percentage of over-65s moving in to some Welsh council areas is significant.
The standout council is Conwy, where nearly one in six who moved there were aged 65 or over.
To put that in context, if 750 people aged over 65 moved to Conwy every year for a decade that is 7,500 people, around the size of Penmaenmawr and Llanfairfechan (two of Conwy’s towns) combined.
Of course, older people also move out of Conwy. But for the last 10 years over 1,500 more retirement age people have moved in than moved out.
This is a trend that has gone on for a long time. Between the last two censuses (2011 and 2021), the average age for Conwy increased by three years, from 46 to 49. This is older than nearby Gwynedd (45) and the joint second-highest average age in Wales (alongside Monmouthshire and behind Powys).
The number of people aged 65 to 74 years rose by around 2,400 (an increase of 17.2%), while the number of residents between 35 and 49 years fell by just under 3,900 (17.5% decrease).
The other areas with high numbers of retirees moving in are Pembrokeshire, Denbighshire, Anglesey and Powys – all popular holiday destinations with a lot of holiday homes, scenic views, and pleasant walking routes.
Comparing retirees with refugees
Now you may be thinking “1,500 net increase in older people moving into Conwy doesn’t seem that much over 10 years”.
And you would be right. But it is absolutely huge compared to the numbers of asylum seekers and refugees.
Let’s compare the figures.
In the last ten years, just 17 refugees have been resettled in Conwy through official government schemes.
As of March 2026, only 20 asylum seekers in Conwy were getting Home Office support.
Now it’s worth saying that this doesn’t include Ukrainians. As of March 2026, there are 209 people who have come to Conwy under all schemes, the vast majority - 182 - of which have come through Homes for Ukraine. That is a tiny fraction of the county’s population, only 0.18%.
So in this one Welsh council we have had the equivalent of over a towns worth of people moving there to retire in a decade, compared with fewer than two dozen refugees who were resettled there.
If we also look at the overall deaths and births for Conwy between 2022-2024, there were 2,287 more people dying than being born. Of Wales’ 22 local authorities, only Carmarthenshire saw a bigger drop. Indeed, only Cardiff and Newport actually saw more people born than die.
What is the effect of this on local councils?
It is an incontrovertible fact that older people tend to be sicker and need more healthcare than younger people.
When older people move to Wales:
They often move permanently rather than temporarily, as opposed to students or young people who are working, and therefore have a longer-term influence on housing.
They generally have more complicated health problems than younger people and are therefore more expensive to treat on the NHS.
They are usually not working, which is why areas with a higher number of retirees generally have lower economic productivity.
They have often moved away from their families in England so are more reliant on state care than older local people with closer support networks.
In Wales, local councils are responsible for delivering social care which, along with education, usually takes up the biggest portion of the yearly budget. This can be anything from:
a carer coming into someone’s home to get them dressed, use the toilet, wash or help with meals.
visits to day care centres.
assisted living facilities.
full-time care homes.
The problem is that our social care system in Wales was designed when life expectancy was a lot lower. We are now much better at making people live longer, but that doesn’t stop them getting ill, developing health issues, losing mobility or needing to rely on other people over that long life.
This newsletter decided to look at some of the councils with the highest proportion of older people moving in and found some seriously worrying trends.
Let’s take Conwy again.
Ten years ago in 2016/2017, Conwy County Borough Council were spending about £52 million on social services. That was just under 26% of their budget for the year.
In 2026/27, the total spending on social services is estimated at £116.6m, around 34% of a budget worth £341m. An eight percentage point increase.
Now let’s compare that to education spending. In 2016/17, Conwy’s education budget was about £79m, or 39% of the budget.
For 2026/27, it is only £110.7m, or 32%.
So spending on social services has actually overtaken education as Conwy’s biggest outgoing.
It’s worth saying here that social services funding isn’t just social care for older people. It also includes disability support, children’s services and safeguarding, but social care for older people usually makes up the bulk of it.
As part of our research we spoke to people across local authorities in Wales who are responsible for delivering social care and managing council budgets. They cited large scale migration of retirees in specific areas as making service delivery in Wales harder.
One source in Conwy told us about the challenges of being “a little bit of a Mecca” for people retiring from England:
“What we’re finding in Conwy is that every single year the additional money that we’re having to add into social care is substantial, but is not being funded through [central] government. So we’re having to fund it either by raising council tax – in the last four years, we’ve raised council tax by getting on for 35% or 36% – or by cutting other services which are equally important to residents.
“If you go back 10 years or 15 years, the social care budget within a local authority budget would have been about two thirds of the education budget. In 2026/27 for the first time in Conwy, the social care budget is now bigger than the education budget. That’s not all older people, but for us in particular older people’s care, both through domiciliary care and residential care, is getting bigger and bigger.
“The issue that we have in Conwy, which might apply to others, but specifically in Conwy to a bigger extent, is that we are a little bit of a Mecca for people retiring from England. As soon as they need care, they come to us because they don’t have family support around them.”
They told us that retirees moving to Wales is directly impacting on their ability to deliver education:
“All services are being impacted to varying degrees. The obvious one is education because whilst we’re not necessarily cutting education, we’re not able to invest [and increase the budget]. In a crude way, our children are actually suffering because we’re having to support our older people.
“What we are having to do is reduce that public realm stuff. We’re currently getting an awful lot of complaints about is things like litter, weeding and all of those sorts of things. The reality of it is that we spend 80% of our money on education and social care, and yet only comparatively a small percentage of our residents receive those services. The services that everybody receives are the things that are being hit.
“So no investment in our libraries, our tourism, and certainly not in our support services. A lot of our essential services like finance, legal, HR, etc, which ultimately are needed to run the organisation, have no chance when it comes to seeking additional resources. So everything’s touched like our planning, our regulatory services. We get an awful lot of complaints about the fact we don’t have dog wardens out fining people for not picking up their dog mess.
“But there just simply isn’t the resource to do that kind of thing because social care is ultimately gobbling up all of the money. Everything else gets no look in at all.”
So we are literally unable to properly equip our future generations because of how much we are spending on our older people.
To reiterate, supporting older people isn’t a bad thing. There is a strong argument that you can judge a lot about a society on how it treats its oldest citizens.
But if you are a Welsh politician railing against the impact of overseas immigration on our public services, you are ignoring a far more significant driver of the pressure - a rapidly aging population.
In fact, one antidote to this pressure is, ironically, more immigration.
Wales is facing a huge challenge. By 2032, the Welsh Government predicts nearly a quarter of our population will be over 65. That is 806,000 people and around 3% higher than in 2022. It is also higher than in England (20.9%), Scotland (23.6%) and Northern Ireland (21.8%). By 2060 that is projected to reach over one million.
Unless people in Wales start procreating a lot quicker, we are going to need those overseas immigrants, especially given the difficulties we currently have in attracting people to the social care profession.
