London and UK still one of the major magnets for Poles: photo - PR
According to Jack Straw, who served successively as both Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2006, Britain should have enforced a 7-year delay period after Poland joined the EU, as France and most other EU countries did.
“Lifting the transitional restrictions on the Eastern European states like Poland and Hungary which joined the EU in mid-2004,” was a “spectacular mistake,” he writes in an article for the Lancashire Telegraph, a paper serving his local constituency as a Labour party MP.
The UK was one of only three countries in the EU, alongside Sweden and Ireland, which allowed Poles and other new members of the union from central europe to come to work in unlimited numbers.
Other countries phased in work permits for the 2004 group of nations which entered the EU.
“We thought that it would be good for Britain if these folk could come and work here from 2004,” the centre-left politician writes.
“Thorough research by the Home Office suggested that the impact of this benevolence would in any event be ‘relatively small, at between 5,000 and 13,000 immigrants per year up to 2010’".
“Events proved these forecasts worthless. Net migration reached close to a quarter of a million at its peak in 2010. Lots of red faces, mine included.”
Straw, who will retire as an MP in 2015, said the move was a “well-intentioned policy we messed up.”
Straw's comments, which are among the most outspoken on the subject of any member of his party, come less than two months before the UK relaxes its border regulations for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens.
Although the two countries joined the EU in 2005, restrictions were placed on the number of immigrants. However, from the beginning of 2014, 'free movement' will be introduced.
Straw did however stress that although the post-2004 numbers of migrants far exceeded predictions, recent research by University College London indicated that “immigrants who arrived after 1999 were 45 per cent less likely to claim state benefits or tax credits than UK natives in the period 2000-2011. (nh/pg)