As many as one million Bulgarians and Romanians have moved to the richer half of Europe to find work in the past four years, but Britain has largely avoided the influx by imposing restrictions, EU figures showed yesterday.

The European Commission urged the Government yesterday to lift the restrictions, arguing that the Polish plumber and other recent EU migrants had boosted Britain’s economy and had not reduced wages or local job opportunities.

Ministers must decide before the end of next month whether to maintain the ban on workers from Bulgaria and Romania for another three years. The Government failed to put any limits on arrivals from the ten countries that joined the EU in 2004, leading to a massive and unexpected influx, mainly of Poles, which led to the ban on Romanians and Bulgarians in 2007.

Official figures show that the number of Bulgarians and Romanians living in Spain had risen from 490,000 in 2005 to 843,000 by the end of 2007, and in Italy from 315,000 to 431,000. The rise in Britain was from 28,000 to 37,000, following the well-publicised restrictions imposed by the Government. However, Spain and Italy also had existing, well-established Bulgarian and Romanian communities.

The influx from the ten countries that joined the EU in 2004 had peaked, the Commission report said, and was steadily declining because of the squeeze on jobs in the economic crisis, as well as rising standards of living back in their homeland.

“The mobility of workers has had a very positive impact and provided a broad contribution to economic growth,” Vladimir Spidla, the EU’s employment commissioner, said yesterday. “Lifting restrictions now would not only make economic sense but would also help to reduce problems such as undeclared work and bogus self-employment. We should not fear that the free migration of workers will increase the unemployment rate because that is unlikely. Workers go where there is work.”

The European Commission report concluded: “Rapidly rising income levels and labour demand in the sending countries, coupled with falling numbers of young people most likely to emigrate, appear to be reducing labour flows and are likely to lead to a further decline in labour supply from within the EU.”

There was an increase in migration by Bulgarians and Romanians from 690,000 living in the EU in 2003 to 1.6 million by the end of 2007. The Commission quoted a study which showed that the GDP of the EU increased by 0.17 per cent in the short term as a result of the movement of workers from new member countries and by 0.28 per cent in the longer term.

Another study found that wages in the pre2004 member countries dropped by 0.08 per cent in the short term and not at all in the longer term. Unemployment rose by 0.04 percentage points as a result of the EU’s enlargement. Over the long term, 9 per cent of Portuguese nationals have settled in other EU countries since 2003, the highest level of emigration, followed by Ireland with 8.2 per cent.

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