UK population and benefit claimants: What do the official figures show?

The UK population is estimated to have grown by nearly three million between 2020 and 2025, official figures show, not by 12 million as stated by Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

In an interview for Sky News broadcast on Wednesday, Sir Jim said: “The population of the UK was 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million – that’s 12 million people.”

The UK population in mid-2020 stood at an estimated 66.7 million, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), not 58 million.

It had climbed to just under 69.5 million by mid-2025, an increase since 2020 of almost 2.8 million.

The UK population reached 58 million in mid-1995, not in 2020, and passed 59 million in 2001.

The population has grown by 12 million since mid-1991, when it stood at an estimated 57.4 million, not since 2020.

Sir Jim also told Sky News: “You can’t have an economy with nine million people on benefits.”

The latest available figures from the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) show there were 8,400,344 people in Britain claiming universal credit (UC) in December 2025.

A further 233,170 people in Northern Ireland were claiming UC as of August 2025, according to the latest data from the Department for Communities.

These figures are snapshots of different moments in time, but together they suggest at least 8.6 million people across the UK were likely to be claiming universal credit towards the end of 2025.

Universal credit is the main means-tested benefit available in the UK and has replaced the mixture of benefits previously in place, such as income support, jobseeker’s allowance, housing benefit and tax credits.

Almost all claimants of these previous benefits have now been moved to UC, with this process due to be complete by the end of March 2026.

Universal credit is available for people in work who are on low incomes, as well as those who are out of work or cannot work.

Of the 8.4 million UC claimants in Britain in December 2025, 2.2 million were in work, DWP figures show.

Some 4.2 million were classed as not being required to work, which includes people in full-time education, over the state pension age, with a child under the age of one or who are considered to have no prospect of work for health or disability reasons.

A further 1.5 million were looking for work while just under 0.5 million were planning or preparing for work, meaning a total of 6.2 million claimants were either not required to work or not in work.