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Population Growth (Local Government Finance)

My hon. Friend is quite right. Others also have the same problem, which is by no means unique to my constituency or local authority. I have spoken with officers in Westminster city council and with London Councils, which used to be known as the Association of London Government. Slough borough council is also playing a leading role in highlighting the issues, and my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) has previously made the point in this Chamber about the problems facing his council. I shall return to the problems facing the other councils shortly. To provide a bit of background, since May 2004 the UK has seen considerable migration from some of the new EU accession countries. Unlike any of the other major economies in the EU, the UK decided not to impose any restrictions on migration. The Prime Minister himself predicted that only 13,000 such workers would travel to the UK and that the bulk of them would return after a short stay. That was a massive underestimate. Even the Government now admit that between 300,000 and 400,000 east European workers have come to the UK since May 2004. That is 25 to 30 times the official prediction. I believe that the right decision was made to allow the free movement of people from the new accession countries in 2004, and in that I disagree with the line that my party took at the time. In the 1980s I spent a huge amount of time in the old eastern Europe. As I may have mentioned, my wife is from the former German Democratic Republic, and I also visited every other one of the captive nations of eastern Europe at that time. Calls at the time were made from the west—indeed, from this House—for the free movement of peoples from east to west. It was difficult to imagine then, when the wall was in place, that hundreds of thousands of people would come. Nevertheless, the position that Lady Thatcher and President Reagan laid out was to welcome the peoples of eastern Europe. The phrase that Ronald Reagan used was ““Tear down this wall””. I do not know what he would have made of efforts to create a new division of Europe based on where one can and cannot work. In any case, I am not here to discuss the rights and wrongs of the policy; rather, I should like to highlight for the Minister the impact that such migration has had on my constituency. For a variety of reasons, Hammersmith and Fulham has proved a popular destination for recent migrants. Despite the unprecedented population shift that we have experienced, however, official Government funding remains based on the borough’s population in the 2001 national census, with some flawed estimates of change since then. This situation is unfair and means that the amount of money that the council receives from central Government to provide vital support services for local residents does not reflect the size and the needs of the local population.