The number of people in England and Wales has shot up by a million in only three years in a population boom of a scale not seen for a century.

And the dramatic increase - mainly fuelled by immigration - is rapidly gathering speed, according to estimates made public yesterday.

Foreign workers are at the heart of the population explosion, according to Government figures which show that numbers had reached 54,348,000, up more than a million since March 2005.

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Other startling statistics released yesterday show that:

• The number of foreign-born workers who found new jobs in Britain since 1997 is now 1.8million. In all, foreign workers now make up one in eight of the UK working population.

• This is 400,000 more than the 1.4million Britons who have found work during the same period.

• A record 207,000 Britons left to make new lives abroad in 2006. Most went to Australia, New Zealand, Spain, France and the U.S.

• A record number of new passports were issued last year - one every three minutes - despite measures designed to tighten up the system.

• Britain is once again topping the European league for asylum claims, as the number of applications to other countries falls.

The latest population leap of a million took three years. The last similar jump took four years, from 2001 and 2005. And before that it took six years for the population to increase by a million between 1995 and 2001.

Historians have to go back to before the First World War to find such a fast growth in population. The rate of increase now - likely to be reaching 5 per cent over a ten-year period - is unmatched since the Victorian era of industrial revolution and the birth of Britain's great cities.

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