The number of people in the UK has passed 61million for the first time, figures showed yesterday.
Record immigration levels over the past decade have driven up the number of women of childbearing age.
This helped boost the number of births last year to 791,000 - up 33,000 on 2007.
For the first time in a decade, the excess of births over deaths played a bigger role than immigration itself in driving population growth, which is now twice as fast as in the 1990s.
