400,000 Romanians and Bulgarians in UK
After liberals scoffed at idea of a ‘flood’, there are now...
MORE than 400,000 Romanian and Bulgarian citizens now live in Britain, a number almost equal to the population of Bristol.
The total is the first official attempt to put a figure to the scale of the Romanian and Bulgarian population since restrictions on the rights of their citizens to work in the UK were lifted nearly four years ago.
It suggests that the number from the two countries who have arrived since the doors to jobs were opened on January 1, 2014, is higher even than the most expansive predictions at the time.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said there were 413,000 Romanians and Bulgarians living in Britain last year. It has estimated that the population of Bristol was 454,000 last year.
The new assessment, produced from large-scale surveys, follows employment estimates which say the number of people born in Romania and Bulgaria who were in work in Britain rose from 146,000 in the first months of 2014 to 362,000 this sum- mer. The dramatic increase in immigration from the two countries comes despite the confidence of many commentators in 2014 that there would be no large-scale immigration from the two countries following the lifting of work restrictions. At the start of January 2014, Romanian ambassador Dr Ion Jinga said the number of Romanians coming to Britain would be ‘fewer than in the previous years’.
Labour MP Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons home affairs committee at the time, travelled to Luton Airport to welcome the first new arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria.
And the BBC seized on misleading early job market figures to ridicule the idea that substantial numbers of migrants would arrive.
In May 2014, its then political editor, Nick Robinson, wrote: ‘Well, well, well. So much for those predictions of a flood of immigrants coming from Romania and Bulgaria once the door to the UK was opened.’
But the scale of migration from the two countries – which joined the EU in 2007 and began to benefit from Brussels’ freedom of movement rules seven years later – has been such that their own home populations have been falling.
The ONS report said that of the 413,000 Romanians and Bulgarians living in Britain, nearly four out of five are Romanian. Similar proportions are of working age and in work.
Only just over 32,000 people from the two countries are ‘economically inactive’ because they are retired or at home looking after children; some 12,600 are students; and only 11,500 are unemployed.
Nearly half of the Romanian and Bulgarian citizens in Britain work in either the construction industry or in hotels, res- taurants and transport trades, the report said. Six out of ten are employed in low or semiskilled jobs – but many have qualifications far above the level of the work they are doing.
Eighteen per cent of Bulgarians in employment in the UK work in banking and finance, while 14 per cent of Romanians are employed in the industry.
The ONS said: ‘Comparing a worker’s highest qualification and the average level of qualification held by those in the job can determine whether someone is matched, overeducated or undereducated for their job.
‘Analysis has shown that 37 per cent of Romanian and Bulgarian citizens are overeducated for the job they are working in.’ Romanians and Bulgarians also work harder than Britons. More than six out of ten work for more than 40 hours a week, almost double the proportion of British citizens who work longer than a traditional working week.
The ONS also found that Romanian and Bulgarian workers are typically paid less than three quarters of the wages of a British citizen.
It said that average UK earnings are £11.30 an hour but Romanian and Bulgarian citizens in the UK average almost £3 an hour less, £8.33.
The estimates were published a day after the Office for Budget Responsibility issued a warning over persistently low rates of productivity in British industry and blamed low levels of investment by businesses for the failure. Immigration between Britain and the two Eastern European countries is virtually one-way, the report said.
There are only 6,200 British citizens in the two countries, the majority of them older Britons in Bulgaria, who are likely to be living in the country’s Black Sea resorts.
There are also 11,700 children who were born in Britain living in Bulgaria and Romania.
The ONS said it had prepared the report ‘in response to an increased need for data about the people who may be most likely to be affected by the UK’s decision to leave the EU’.
According to the latest estimates from Eurostat, the EU’s statistics arm, the population of Romania fell by more than 100,000 during 2016, from 19,760,000 to 19,638,000.
Bulgaria’s population dropped over the same year from 7,154,000 to 7,102,000.
Stephen Glover – Page 19
‘Almost equal to the population of Bristol’