With its cobbled streets and Tudor buildings, Leominster looks every inch the quintessential English market town. Nestled in rural Herefordshire, it is a place of antique shops, homely pubs and tea rooms.
In the past two years the town’s character has begun to change. Nearly 3,000 eastern Europeans have been issued with National Insurance numbers across the county and many have ended up in Leominster.
They have been attracted by the prospect of regular work. The region has traditionally been a magnet for seasonal fruit pickers but hundreds now work all year round in local factories, care homes, hotels, restaurants and pubs.
Nowhere is the change more apparent than in the Blue Note cafe in Leominster, where on Friday night the air hummed to half a dozen languages as Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Latvians smoked roll-ups and sipped on Czech beer.
They included Barnabas Fexete, 30, a Hungarian who left Kiskunfelegyhaza, 100 miles south of Budapest, in January last year. A former insurance broker, he earns £1,000 a month at a factory making coffee filters. He is single and saves most of what he earns.
“When I came to England it was to earn more money,” he said. “I hadn’t heard of Leominster until a friend told me about it. I miss the food at home, I miss the goulash. But I’m very happy here and plan to stay for a couple more years at least.”
Leominster’s native residents have, by and large, welcomed the new workers. Sue Witherstone, the bar owner, has learnt to say “shut the door” in seven languages and keeps a stock of other useful east European phrases on cards behind the bar.
“We’d rather have people like Barnabas than some of the miserable locals we get round here. If our kids can go to Australia for a few years, why can’t these kids come here?” she said.
However, the sheer weight of numbers has caused tensions to rise as competition for local services has increased.
Pauline Davies, a Conservative town councillor, said: “There are just too many immigrants and we don’t want any more. They’re a nice bunch but we just haven’t got the room. Our town is only so big — we can’t get dentists’ appointments any more.”
Leominster is not unique. Hundreds of small towns across Britain are experiencing similar trends.
Official statistics released last week show that the accession of new countries to the European Union in 2004 has resulted in one of the biggest waves of migration that Britain has ever seen.
A total of 427,000 migrants from eastern Europe registered for work with British employers between May 2004 and June 2006, according to the Home Office. Once the self-employed such as plumbers and cleaners were added, the total was nearer 600,000.
David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford University, said only the arrival of the Huguenots from France in the 17th century was comparable in terms of numbers. While that may have been a bigger migration as a percentage of the population, he calculated, the absolute population movement in the past two years was the single biggest in British history.
Before the new countries joined the EU, ministers had published research predicting that the resulting net inflow of workers to Britain would be only 13,000 a year to the end of the decade.
“The government wildly underestimated how many people were coming into Britain and that’s why there are now strains on public services,” said Damian Green, the Conservative immigration spokesman.
Employers’ organisations argue that the influx has brought real benefits. In a letter to The Times last week, high-profile businessmen, including Philip Hampton, chairman of Sainsbury’s, the supermarket chain, described the recent migration as “a great success”.
“It has plugged gaps in the labour market and boosted economic growth ... indeed, young Poles, Czechs and others have clearly boosted Britain’s economy and public services such as the NHS,” the businessmen said.
In January next year, Romania and Bulgaria are set to join the EU. According to Open Europe, a think tank, this could bring Britain a further 620,000 migrants. Should the United Kingdom keep its doors open to them? According to the government, most migrants from within the EU are young and stay for a short period before returning home. Critics argue that higher wages in the UK than at home are an incentive to make the move permanent.
Are migration numbers about to jump again and is the current influx, which has pushed the UK population to above 60m, helping or hindering Britain?
IT was to Christian Dustmann, a German professor of economics at University College London, that the Home Office turned in 2003 to assess how the enlarged EU would affect migration.
It was a tall order. Dustmann and his team had no idea what migration policies other EU countries would adopt and no record of past migrations from eastern Europe on which to base their forecast.
“We made it very, very clear that there was a series of assumptions and that they had to be used with great caution,” Dustmann said last week in his office near Euston station.
In the absence of data from Europe, the researchers concentrated on historic migration patterns from more than 30 other countries, including Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The finished report emphasised that migration was “not likely to be overly large”.
It also said, however: “If immigration rates from these countries differ substantially from historical migration rates, the predictions on these estimates may be misleading.”
Ministers, already under pressure over the lax handling of asylum seekers, were far less cautious. “The number coming here for employment will be minimal,” Beverley Hughes, then immigration minister, told the Commons.
“It was a complete cock- up,” claimed Sir Andrew Green, chairman of MigrationWatch UK, a critic of mass immigration. “The government failed to grasp the situation and relied too heavily on a report which was fundamentally flawed. As a result they didn’t take action.”
On the evening of May 1, 2004 Tony Blair heralded the EU enlargement as a new dawn for Europe. “Ultimately this will be to the benefit of our country as well as these new countries,” he said. “It is a good thing in terms of our security; it is a good thing in terms of our trade and our commerce and our jobs.”
As the prime minister spoke, the front-runners of the migratory wave were preparing to move. Flights and coaches were fully booked as thousands of young eastern Europeans began to make their way west in search of higher wages.
Britain was the only large European economy that let them in. With the exception of Sweden and Ireland, all other EU countries opted to block them for up to seven years.
The newcomers spread themselves across the country. From fish processing plants in Inverness to strawberry fields in Herefordshire, they became highly sought after as employees — thanks to their willingness to work and their qualifications, loyalty and dedication. They are now mostly employed as factory workers and in the hospitality industry, although the Home Office also revealed last week that there are 15 circus performers, 10 authors and 680 flower pickers among their number.
Anna Slawinska, 25, arrived in Scotland six months ago, having secured a job at Strathaird Salmon, a fish processing plant in Inverness. When her employer discovered that she had a degree in microbiology, she was moved from the factory floor to the company’s laboratory.
“Although there are jobs available in Poland, they don’t pay as well. I am very happy here,” she said.
According to Bill Macdonald, the company’s human resources manager, newcomers such as Slawinska have proved invaluable. Nearly 60% of the company’s 400-strong workforce is now from eastern Europe.
“They have a different work ethic and we have found that overall our attendance and time keeping records have improved,” he said.
In Hammersmith, west London, eastern European immigrants have transformed the local community. In the past two years more than 2,000 have been given National Insurance numbers locally, but evidence on the streets suggests that their numbers in the area could be far higher. Young men and women scour jobs cards written in Polish in newsagents’ windows. Others sit outside the Maja cafe, smoking strong Polish cigarettes and sipping espressos.
Paulina Bugaj, 26, a student and barmaid from Poland, said: “I’ve been living in England for five years now and I love it here. I’m studying business and administration at the same time as working. There is a huge difference between the money you can earn in Poland and what you earn here. Back there, I wouldn’t be able to pay for college — my parents would have to completely support me. Living in England gives me and my friends independence.”
From the perspective of UK plc and the Treasury, the arrival of Bugaj and her colleagues has been an almost unfettered success story.
The record immigration of the past two years means that Britain’s working-age population is growing faster than that of any of our main European competitors, which produces greater economic growth.
Business for New Europe, a pro-Europe group of business leaders, estimated last week that the new immigrants were contributing £2.5 billion a year to the economy. Roland Rudd, its chairman, said: “As well as Polish plumbers and property investors, the UK economy benefits from Hungarians in hospitality, Estonian engineers, Czech caterers and Slovakian scientists. This is because of our open labour markets following the EU enlargement of 2004. We have reaped the reward of this approach. We should abandon it at our peril.” The sheer scale of immigration in the past two years has also given rise to tensions, however. Almost four-fifths of the arrivals who have registered for work earn an hourly rate of £4.50 to £6.
By contrast, less than one-fifth of the overall working population earn less than £6 an hour.
The building sector is one area where the impact of immigration has hit native workers hardest. Norman Berry, 56, of Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, has worked on building sites for the past 30 years. “Polish workers have flooded our sites and are prepared to work for much less than us,” he said. “British builders are paid up to £15 an hour, but eastern Europeans are willing to do the same job for £6 an hour. If you’ve got a family to support it’s just not enough.”
The Home Office estimates that fewer than 1,000 new east European immigrants claim benefits, but the official figures do not appear to reflect the demands being made on local social services.
According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, only 300 immigrants settle in Slough, Berkshire, each year. Yet the local council says there are at least 10,000 Poles alone living there. More than 8,000 new National Insurance numbers have been handed out locally in the past 18 months.
“Working migrants have become an invisible population whose children need school places, who need to be housed appropriately and in some cases need social services. Official statistics have failed to reflect this,” said Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, head of the Local Government Association.
Two prominent Labour MPs, Frank Field the former welfare minister and John Denham the former Home Office minister, have publicly warned about the effects of immigration on employment.
“If you have a choice between hiring someone who has been on incapacity benefit with a mental health problem for five years or a young fit Pole, who are you going to go for?” asked Denham.
The government has largely failed to confront the grumbling among Labour’s grassroots. It continues to treat immigration in politically correct terms, talking of racism and the need to ease the problems of integration — which has not been an issue with eastern Europeans.
In the past few weeks Labour bigwigs have been falling over themselves to insist it is “not racist” to talk about immigration. Last week Ruth Kelly, the cabinet minister responsible, announced a new commission for integration and cohesion aimed at combating extremism. What does this have to do with the potential arrival of many thousands of Bulgarians and Romanians? Recruitment agencies are already reporting a surge in interest from Romanians. George Marinescu, an unemployed 26-year-old gypsy from Bucharest, was among those keen to make the move. “I would go to work in the
UK as a construction worker, if that would be possible, but only with a legal contract,” he said.
It was left to Alistair Darling, the low-profile trade secretary, to drop a hint last week that the Bulgarians and Romanians might be told not to come. But he could manage only the cryptic: “Immigration has to be carefully managed and our policy is the policy of a managed system. No one who deals with immigration fails to realise that we have to have a system which is properly managed, properly controlled. That is essential.”
A paper from Joan Ryan, the Home Office minister, leaked to The Sunday Times last month revealed that the government estimates that between 60,000 and 140,000 Romanians and Bulgarians will arrive in the first year after accession. It warned that they will include 45,000 “undesirables” who have been flagged up because of immigration irregularities, passport fraud and other links to crime.
The paper says: “The key to us knowing when A2 (Romanian and Bulgarian) criminals seek to enter the UK is to ensure that we have as much information as possible on serious criminals. The issue is whether the . . . impact of A2 access can be managed . . . or whether the political impact of unlimited A2 access at a time of growing public anxiety over immigration means we should restrict access.”
The trouble is that access cannot be effectively restricted because UK immigration management systems are “not fit for purpose”, as John Reid, the home secretary, admitted earlier this year. So the Romanians and Bulgarians are likely to arrive anyway — and the Great Immigration will continue to transform Britain into the melting pot of 21st-century Europe.
Additional reporting: Nicola Smith
