UK work scheme for new EU members going as planned
24 February 2005
The worker registration scheme for nationals of new European Union member states employed in the UK is running smoothly, according to a statement released by the Home Office on February 22.
The scheme applies to the eight former communist countries that joined the EU on May 1 2005 - Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia - but excludes Malta and Cyprus which also joined then. It allows people from these countries to work in Britain after registering with the government, thereby allowing monitoring of the effect of EU expansion on the UK labour market and restricting access to social benefits.
It is a compromise between outright free movement of labour for the new member states and imposing prohibitions of several years on their rights to work, a policy followed by most of the 15 established EU countries. The UK government says that with national unemployment at just 4.7 percent and labour shortages in many areas, the scheme benefits all sides.
According to Home Office statistics, 40,000 people from the accession states applied under the scheme in the fourth quarter of 2005, bring the total number since May last year to about 130,000. Around 40 percent of the applicants are believed to have been in the UK prior to May 1 and to have legitimised their status through registering. Fewer than 800 accession nationals have applied for unemployment benefits, with 97 percent of these claims refused immediately. They make up 0.4% of the UK's labour force and contributed an estimated 240 million pounds to Britain's economy between May and December 2004.
"People from the accession states already here have legitimised their position by registering with the scheme and are now contributing to our economy, paying tax and National Insurance but also benefiting from the protections of our employment and health and safety laws," said UK Immigration Minister Des Browne.
The worker registration scheme will eventually lead to the phasing out of the current quota based scheme for labour in the agriculture, food processing and hospitality sectors. This is because a large proportion of places under this scheme were taken by nationals from the countries awaiting EU membership before May 1 2004, and who are now covered under worker registration.