No wonder young people like me are escaping from Britain

A funny thing happens when you leave the UK.

- KATIE STRICK

You pack your life into a suitcase, feeling like you're doing something brave and intrepid. You sign up for an exotic new routine of ocean swims and expat run clubs. Then - if you move to Sydney like I did last year - you realise half your fellow runners are British lawyers, doctors and civil servants who probably lived a few streets from you in London and that perhaps the whole thing wasn't so brave or intrepid after all.

I moved to Sydney a month after my 31st birthday last September, one of tens of thousands of Brits to take advantage of the Aussie government upping the British working holiday visa age limit to 35. Turns out I'm hardly an outlier.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), net migration to the UK has dropped by two-thirds in a single year because young people like me are leaving the country in droves — 87,000 aged 16-24 left, as did 87,000 aged 25-34. That is no country for young people. The figures come just months after a think tank found more than half of young people have considered leaving Britain under Labour, with government leaders now concerned about a “brain drain” among talented and ambitious twenty- and thirty-somethings.