How many people in Britain don’t speak English?

Last week the leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage MP, said in a video shared thousands of times on X and seen by many others on TikTok that “one million people living in this country don’t speak any English at all”.

He made a similar claim in an interview with Nick Robinson [18:10] released on the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast on 13 February, saying: “You look at the last census, there’s a million living in Britain don’t speak English. There’s four million don’t speak very good English.”

This is not what the last census showed, however, and as far as we can tell from the official data, Mr Farage’s numbers are much too high. In the 2021 Census, only 161,000 people in England and Wales said they couldn’t speak any English, while an additional 880,000 people said they could not speak English well. And while those figures are five years old and the true number may have risen since, they’re very unlikely to have risen by as much as Mr Farage’s comments suggested, as we explain below.

We’ve asked Reform UK several times about Mr Farage’s claim but haven’t received a response.

Where did these numbers come from?

Although Reform hasn’t confirmed the source of its leader’s claim on X, Mr Farage himself mentioned the last census, both on the Political Thinking podcast and in an article for the Telegraph on the same day the X video was shared.

In that article, he wrote: “It’s a startling fact that as of 2021 some 880,000 people in this country could not speak English passably and 161,000 could not speak any English at all. Millions more migrants have arrived since then.”

As the Office for National Statistics (ONS) bulletin he linked to shows, these numbers are roughly right for England and Wales, where English and Welsh are both counted. (Scotland and Northern Ireland carry out their own censuses.) But while these two figures sum to over one million, the first one (880,000) refers to people who said they “could not speak English well”. Only 161,000 said they couldn’t speak it “at all”.

The same ONS bulletin also reports that 4.1 million people spoke English “well” or “very well”, but didn’t consider it their main language. It’s possible Mr Farage had this figure in mind when he said that four million people “barely speak passable English”, even though the ONS does not use the term and speaking English “well” is arguably better than “barely passable”.

It’s very unlikely these numbers are correct

While the 2021 Census appears to offer the latest reliable data on English language proficiency, it is now five years old, which means it may be out of date.

In his Telegraph article, Mr Farage made the point that “millions more” migrants have arrived since 2021, which is correct. So is it likely that enough of the new arrivals can’t speak English to bring the total up to one million in 2026?

Well, it’s almost certainly not the case that all 161,000 people who couldn’t speak any English in 2021 would still be counted today. Some will have died or left the country since then, and the English skills of others will have improved.

But even if we do assume that all these people would still count, it leaves a big gap.

It’s likely that some people in Scotland and Northern Ireland also can’t speak any English, but assuming Mr Farage’s one million figure related to England and Wales, over 800,000 others would need to have arrived in the five years since 2021. And looking at the official migration estimates from the ONS, that seems very unlikely.

Around 4.83 million people moved to the UK for at least a year between June 2021 and June 2025. Many will have left since, perhaps after working or studying for a few years, but even if you assume that all have stayed, about a sixth of them would need to be unable to speak any English at all for the one million figure to be right.

But we can see from the Census that even among people whose main language is not English, and who have lived here for less than five years, just 2.5% said they couldn’t speak English, which is more like one in 40.

The data here doesn’t line up perfectly, so we can’t produce an updated estimate since the Census, but it does suggest that for Mr Farage to be right, the recent arrivals would need to be far less likely to speak English than they had been in the past. We’ve seen no evidence of that, and nor has Mr Farage provided any.