Senior figures in Tony Blair’s government, including John Prescott and Jack Straw, urged the then prime minister to delay opening the UK labour market to eastern European nationals shortly before they became EU citizens, newly released documents reveal.
Papers released to the National Archives in Kew, west London, showed Prescott and Straw warned of a surge in immigration unless some controls were put in place.
But others – including the then home secretary, David Blunkett – argued that the economy needed the “flexibility and productivity of migrant labour” if it was to continue to prosper.
On 1 May 2004, 10 countries officially became EU member states, the majority of them former eastern bloc states that, at the time, had lower income levels compared with the rest of Europe.
Nationals from those countries could work and live in Britain thanks to freedom of movement as soon as they became EU citizens. As the 1 May date approached, Blair’s cabinet appeared publicly supportive, but the papers suggest more fraught discussions behind the scenes.
Prescott and Straw, who were deputy prime minister and foreign secretary at the time, wrote to Blair in February 2004. They both urged him to consider pushing back the 1 May start date. The original 15 EU member states could impose restrictions, including annual limits and work permits, for up to seven years after the 10 new states joined the bloc.
In a letter dated 10 February 2004, Straw called on Blair to hold a meeting with himself, David Blunkett and Andrew Smith, who served as work and pensions secretary at the time, to consider a delay until “a rather less feverish time (hopefully) in, say, November [2004]”.
He said: “if we do not think this through now”, the government could be forced to suspend the right to work for the new EU nationals “in the least propitious of circumstances”.
The UK, Ireland and Sweden were the only pre-2004 EU member states to fully open their labour markets. Straw said that other EU member states that were assumed to be adopting a similar arrangement to the UK had “began to peel away”, including Germany and France, who ended up imposing restrictions.
A meeting was subsequently scheduled for 17 February 2004. A day before the summit, Prescott wrote to Blair, saying he supported Straw’s position. He urged the prime minister not to introduce the measures on 1 May, instead saying they could be enacted in the “near future”. He added it was “very important that we get this right and do not adopt a position that we may have to reconsider within a short period”.
He also voiced concerns about the impact the new EU nationals could have on public services, saying he was “extremely concerned about the additional pressures they could bring to bear on social housing”.
Blunkett, who publicly welcomed the new EU citizens, also wrote to Blair, laying out his opposition to imposing restrictions on their right to work in the UK, saying such a scheme would “not only be expensive and bureaucratic but I believe ineffective”.
He said a restrictive scheme could buy the government short-term political cover but would only be “storing up more deep-seated political difficulties in the very near future and closer to the general election”.
Soon after the meeting, the government confirmed it was sticking to the 1 May date. After this date, EU citizens were able to arrive in the UK largely unrestricted; however, they were only able to claim benefits if they were in work.
At the time, Home Office officials forecast a net increase of no more than 13,000 workers a year after 1 May 2004. In the weeks after, however, the files showed the numbers arriving were far outstripping these estimates. One official said they faced an “elephant trap” and advised ministers to “err on the side of publishing less rather than more” when it came to releasing official data.
In the years after, net migration to the UK rose to more than 200,000 a year. Straw later said that the failure to put in place any transitional controls had been a “spectacular mistake” that had far-reaching consequences.
The issue of freedom of movement would go on to strongly influence British politics in the 2010s. Ukip, which ran an anti-immigration campaign under Nigel Farage, won more than 3m votes in the 2015 general election. A year later, the UK voted to leave the EU in a seismic political moment for the nation.
