The drive for foreign workers amounts to a side-stepping of employment laws that forbid discrimination against the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. Workers from Eastern European countries that joined the EU in May and people from India and Bangladesh are flocking to Britain to fill vacancies in the hospitality industry, agriculture, security, accountancy, construction and healthcare.

Between May and September, government figures released yesterday show that there were 90,950 applicants from eight Eastern Europe and Baltic states — the equivalent of 0.3 per cent of the British working population — and more than 87,200 were given permission to work. Another 3,700 were still being processed at the end of September.

Britain needed workers for 600,000 vacancies, including low-paid jobs that were often difficult to fill.

Australians, New Zealanders and people from the Far East are also moving to the UK and are quickly snapped up by companies desperate for enthusiastic hard workers with proven experience.

A combination of a lack of investment in training for key industries, a skills shortage and a desire by a large number of people to stay on benefits has fuelled overseas recruitment, businesses claim.

Bob Cotton, chief executive of the British Hospitality Association, which represents the hotel, catering and leisure industry, said that many employers in hospitality were targeting trained staff from Poland, Hungary and Lithuania.

A visa arrangement with the Home Office, allowing up to 10,000 people from Bangladesh, the sub-continent and the Far East to travel to Britain for work each year, had also boosted the number of foreign workers in restaurants and hotels, he said.

Restaurant owners and hoteliers recruit overseas staff directly from catering colleges, often in association with specialist local agencies.

Mr Cotton said: “One of the biggest problems is that while we have a low level of unemployment, we have millions of people claiming benefits.

“Some of these people would rather work fewer hours so they retain their benefits. Foreign workers are happy to work between 30 and 50 hours a week.”

Horticultural companies, including fruit and vegetable growers, are also recruiting from across the world, including Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia. Under a government-sponsored initiative called the Student Agricultural Workers Scheme, pupils from outside the EU can work in Britain for up to six months.

Last year 25,000 work cards were available, but this has been reduced to 16,200 in anticipation of an influx of workers from the ten accession states to the EU.

Concordia, a youth organisation, has links with agriculture universities worldwide. Christine Lumb, its executive director, says that there is not enough investment in agricultural colleges in Britain, which has led to a severe skills shortage.

After yesterday’s first assessment of the Government’s registration scheme for workers from the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, said that the policy had contributed more than £120 million to the economy.

“Our commonsense app-roach to EU enlargement has put us at a clear advantage compared with the rest of Europe,” he told a TUC conference. The policy had been attacked this year as “opening the floodgates and newspapers suggested people from Eastern Europe would be pillaging wives and daughters”, but it had worked for the benefit of the country, Mr Blunkett said.

Poland accounted for 48,500 of the applicants and profiles of all registered workers show that 36,500 were aged under 35.

Registered workers paid an estimated £20 million in tax and national insurance. Of the total, 96 per cent were working fulltime.

Eighty per cent were earning between £4.50 and £5.99 an hour and the number claiming benefits was very small.

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