Last year fewer people emigrated from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom, while the number of immigrants from the UK to the Netherlands increased. This situation has been the case since 2015 - shortly before the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union in June 2016, Statistics Netherlands reported on Friday. The Brexit is officially happening at midnight.

In 2019, a total of 2,600 people who were born in the Netherlands moved to the United Kingdom - the lowest number in 20 years. The number of Dutch people returning from the United Kingdom was only slightly lower. On balance, only a few hundred Dutch people left for the UK last year. In 2015, there were nearly 2.3 thousand.

While emigration of Dutch to the UK is declining, the immigration of people born in the UK to the Netherlands has been increasing since 2015. Last year 6,700 Britons settled in the Netherlands, 60 percent more than in 2015. If the number of Britons who returned to the UK from the Netherlands are subtracted, the number of British people living in the Netherlands increased by 3,600 in 2019.

The flow of non-Dutch and non-British people moving from the UK to the Netherlands has also been growing for years. This group includes relatively many Polish, Spanish, Italian and French people. The largest group of emigrants moving to the UK from the Netherlands aside from British and Dutch are from Somalia.

"Overall, the migration balance between the Netherlands and the United Kingdom has been positive in recent years," the stats office said. Last year 5,400 more people moved from the UK to the Netherlands than the other way around. This balance was negative in the period 2010 to 2015.