By Annette Chrysostomou
You would think it would be easy to find out how many British people live in Cyprus, so why have the plethora of EU referendum stories in recent months provided such divergent figures – from 24,000 to a staggering 80,000 – when writing how many Brits live here?
As always, it depends on how you count, especially as the British living in Cyprus are not obliged to register with the British High Commission.
The 24,000 figure is perhaps the most reliable, as it comes from the 2011 official Cyprus census which had officials count those living in the Republic one by one.
The method in this case was to go from house to house and record those with British citizenship. An official of the statistics department responsible for demographics explained how this works.
“We counted the people who have lived on the island for at least 12 months or those who have been here for a few months with the intention of staying 12 months,” she said. Both those born in Cyprus and the UK are included by this method. The drawback is that such a census is only carried out every 10 years, and the current data are from 2011, after which much has happened to lead to a change in the numbers, such as the economic crisis which forced some British expats to leave Cyprus.
Another way to count people is to record where they have been born, which includes Cypriots born in the UK. Counted like this, the number from the same census in 2011 is 31,495.
The only other number readily available is also rather out of date, from 2010. The Institute for Public Policy Research found that at that time 58,955 British lived in Cyprus. And these were only the full time residents. Including part timers, the number swells to 65,000.
According to the site, the researchers who calculated the figures developed different methods that draw on different statistical sources to get to the results, each with incomplete coverage and varying degrees of reliability.
“Where official data is absent, inaccurate or out of date,” the institute stated, “we have generally used an estimate of the number of UK passports issued during the last 10 years. The use of passport data is complicated by factors such as passports being issued overseas to replace those lost or stolen and the fact that some dual nationals choose to use another country’s passport.”
The British High Commission in Cyprus doesn’t count British residents, but depends on its numbers on passport records supplied by the British government.
“The Cyprus census counts those who are British but have no other nationality. The passport count includes those with a dual nationality. The current number for the Republic of Cyprus, which is an estimate, is around 65,000,” said Alexandra Needham, the press spokesperson for the British High Commission.
An additional 5,000 to 15,000 are estimated to live in the north, so there may well be 80,000 altogether. These are rough calculations, but at least they are from 2016.
