Tony Blair opened Britain’s borders to eastern Europe despite migrant influx warning from ministers, files reveal
31 December 2024, 09:06
Tony Blair’s government pressed ahead with an open borders policy for new EU countries in 2004 despite ministers urging him to re-think the policy, newly released files have revealed.
Listen to this article
Loading audio...
In 2004, the Labour government relaxed immigration controls after eight countries, such as Poland, Lithuania and Hungary, joined the EU.
Now, Cabinet Office documents which have just been made available in the National Archives have revealed Mr Blair was to delay the move.
Both his deputy prime minister John Prescott and his foreign secretary Jack Straw raised concerns immigration would surge.
But another minister, then home secretary David Blunkett, said that the economy required "flexibility and productivity of migrant labour" to continue flourishing.
The Home Office had anticipated that the impact of allowing unfettered access to the UK jobs market would be fairly limited.
Read more: Trump renews unsuccessful calls from first term for US to buy Greenland from Denmark
But three months before the borders were set to open, Mr Straw wrote to Mr Blair calling for a policy re-think.
He warned that other countries "who we thought would be joining us have begun to peel away".
Mr Straw added that "France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece and Luxembourg are all imposing transition periods of at least two years. Portugal is likely to follow suit."
"If we do not think this through now... we could be forced to take urgent action," he said.
Mr Prescott said he was "extremely concerned" that a sudden large influx of migrants would put pressure on social housing.
But Mr Blunkett, with the backing of work and pensions secretary Andrew Smith and the Treasury, argued they should keep to the plan on "economic grounds".
He argued they would tighten the regulations to prevent migrants travelling Britain simply to claim benefits. The former home secretary said calls for a work permit scheme were "not only expensive and bureaucratic but I believe ineffective".
Mr Blair himself started to express concerns about whether tougher benefit rules would go far enough, a handwritten note has revealed.
It read: "Are we sure this does the trick? I don't want to have to return to it. "I am not sure we shouldn't have a work permits approach also."
Officials reportedly estimated there would be a net increase of around 13,000 workers from the new EU states each year.
Within weeks of the policy being rolled out the numbers arriving began exceeding earlier estimates, with net migration eventually rising to hundreds of thousands a year.
One official admitted the government faced an “elephant trap” and told ministers to “err on the side of publishing less rather than more” when releasing official data.
Mr Straw has since admitted that Britain’s reluctance to put in the place the controls other EU nations had done was a “spectacular mistake” with far-reaching impacts .
Mr Blair has also since admitted he was not aware of the scale of the migrants that would come to Britain. He said in 2017: “We didn’t know the numbers. “
But by the way it’s very important to realise two things.
When these countries joined the EU, [it was] very important for us that they did join the EU – important for our security, important for our economy.”
Net migration, which measures the difference between the number of people arriving in the UK and the number leaving, hit record highs of 906,000 in the year to June 2023.
This dropped by 20% to 728,000 in the year to 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
But figures are still high by "historic standards", the ONS has said.
ONS director Mary Gregory said the drop is "driven by declining numbers of dependants on study visas coming from outside the EU,"
In November, prime minister Keir Starmer accused the previous conservative government of running an "open borders experiment" while in power.
As part of Labour's plan to reduce migration, the PM announced a new security deal with Iraq, designed to tackle people smuggling and organised crime networks operating across the region and in Europe.
