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European Union (Accessions) Bill

I shall deal with that point. One thing that we should learn from the previous expansion is that the Government’s figures and predictions were entirely wrong, not least because the UK responded differently from our EU partners. The Government have to consider how to learn from that experience and what its implications are as we approach this latest expansion. The Home Office’s predictions for immigration from the accession 10 were spectacularly wrong. In 2003, it predicted that net immigration from the new member states would be between 5,000 and 13,000 a year to 2010. In fact, in the 14 months alone between 1 May 2004 and 30 June 2005, there were 232,000 applications for the workers registration scheme, of which 220,000 were accepted.