Official figures revealing that the number of foreign-born workers filling low skill jobs has doubled in nine years has reignited the debate over immigration and whether welfare reform is enough to encourage UK citizens to take poorly paid jobs.
The Office for National Statistics indicated that nearly 20% of low skilled posts, the equivalent of 666,000, are now held by workers who were born abroad, up from 9% or 298,000 in 2002. The number of UK-born workers holding these jobs fell by 480,000 to 2.56 million over the same period.
Workers from the eight eastern European countries that joined the European Union in 2004 and who were subject to few immigration controls accounted for two thirds of the increase and the statistics revealed that they were concentrated in such low skilled posts.
An additional 1.01 million workers from non-EU countries were found to work in mainly middle and upper-level skills categories. The coalition government is trying to cut net migration by capping the number of EU migrants and restricting access for foreign students to UK universities, however.
John Philpott, chief economic adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development told the Financial Times that the figures indicated how dependent the country had become on migrant labour filling vacancies that UK workers were unwilling to take.
The situation strengthened the government’s case for changes to the welfare system to get the long-term unemployed into work, he added.
But Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, questioned whether the government’s proposed reforms would do anything to reduce demand for migrant workers, not least because they tended to be concentrated in the south east of England rather than in deprived areas where welfare dependency was more entrenched.
Moreover, he believed that the government’s work programme and universal credit plans would have only a limited impact on helping young unemployed people who were most likely to be competing for such low skilled jobs.
