I was awoken from my slumbers yesterday by a voice from the local constabulary. It was not a dawn raid but an appearance by Julie Spence, Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, on the Today programme. In fact, she was the one having her collar felt as PC John Humphrys grilled her on her publication of a report complaining that the county’s coppers are struggling to cope with an influx of Eastern European migrants. “People will jump on this,” said Humphrys, invoking the spectre of racism as Ms Spence revealed that knife-wielding foreigners were slow to get the message that offensive weapons are not tolerated in Britain, that arrests of foreign nationals for drink-driving in Cambridgeshire soared from 81 in 2004 to 306 in 2006, and that the Fens have become a battleground for feuding Lithuanians.

Political commentators who make such remarks about foreigners have been known to be invited down to the police station to be reminded of the racial incitement laws, but I am pleased that the chief constable felt able to make her point. It is about time that the debate over rising crime levels in “broken Britain” was broadened to include the possibility that, besides the decline in national morals since Enid Blyton’s day, we have also imported a few crime problems from elsewhere.

That our murder rate has doubled since the 1950s, for example, is not entirely unconnected with our having absorbed a great number of migrants from cultures much more violent than our own. Lithuania, for example, one of whose citizens was recently murdered by a compatriot in Wisbech, has a murder rate seven times our own: 0.103 per 1,000 population per year compared with 0.014 per 1,000.

One wouldn’t want to press the point too hard. It is equally true that we have exported a few crime problems of our own over the past few decades, as anyone who has witnessed the behaviour of stag parties in Prague or lager louts in Majorca can attest.

And of course, immigration has had many advantages, too: one being to keep the fruit and vegetable growers of the Fens in business at a time when the source of British labour has all but dried up. But while selling us the benefits of immigration, the Government woefully omitted to make preparations for the accompanying social costs.

Take Cambridgeshire. Migration, mainly from Eastern Europe, is projected to swell the population by 69,000 – or more than 12 per cent – by 2016. And yet the provision of public services is still based on population projections made before it became apparent how many Eastern European migrant workers would travel to Britain to look for work. Cambridgeshire Constabulary suddenly finds itself having to cope with 100 different languages, incurring translation costs of £1 million a year. All this with a police force which, head for head, is less than half the size of some Metropolitan districts: the county has to make do with 187 officers per 100,000 population, compared with a national average of 266.

Moreover, Cambridgeshire can’t employ more police officers off its own bat because most funding comes in the form of a central government grant, based on out-of-date population projections.

As with policing, so with education, health and housing. When the Government opened the doors to Eastern European migrants in 2004, it appeared to give no thought whatsoever to where, in the middle of a housing crisis, they would all live. It was left to officials in Slough to provide the answer: with the aid of Google Earth they detected 50 garden sheds that had suddenly sprung up in the gardens of rented properties. In one three-bedroom semi 30 migrant workers were found to be residing, using beds in shifts or sleeping on kitchen worktops. The sleepy Office for National Statistics, on whose figures the Government bases central government funding of local authorities, hadn’t a clue: it recorded that in 18 months only 300 migrant workers had settled in the town. Yet in the same period 8,850 new national insurance numbers had been issued to migrant workers there.

How is a local authority, legally obliged to maintain services for all its residents and yet unable to increase its take of council tax, supposed to cope with such a discrepancy? It is one way of making migrant workers from the former Soviet bloc feel at home in Britain: our central planners are about as effective as those from the communist era. It wasn’t until this March that Liam Byrne, the Immigration Minister, finally admitted that there had been a slight oversight in making preparations for the surge in immigration, and set up a “migration impacts forum” charged with the duty of studying the burdens placed on public services.

The tragedy of this failure of central planning is that it risks undermining the case for free movement of workers within the EU. Every overflowing sewer from a house stuffed with 30 Bulgarians, every queue of 150 Lithuanians for the only NHS dentist in 50 miles, every vodka-swilling Polish motorist who escapes justice for lack of a translation service, gives fuel to those who argue that immigrants are a threat to our way of life.

The ploy of legalising migrant workers from Eastern Europe should have done away with the problems caused by illegal immigration. It should have eliminated the incentive for workers to go underground, sleeping in garden sheds and evading Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. Migrant workers should be, and be seen to be, paying through their taxes for extra public services laid on to serve their needs, disarming native Britons who moan about propping up families of idle Lithuanians.

Instead, government planners continue blithely on as if no Eastern European migrant worker had ever set foot in the country. The continuation of a liberal immigration policy depends on the mess being sorted out fast.

Times Recommends

• Resist urge to throw voters red meat
• Slay sacred cows and be candid
• We cannot let these 100 deaths deflect us