The immigration issue has returned to the political agenda of late, with recent figures indicating that more than 400,000 migrants from the EU eastern European ‘accession states’ have registered to work in Britain since May 2004, while unemployment has crept up again.

Almost 70 per cent of London’s 300,000-strong hospitality workforce are migrants, with 21 per cent of Eastern Europeans registering for work since May 2004 have their first jobs in hospitality.

The majority often are young and single Poles, with almost two-thirds of our new migrant workforce hailing from Poland.

Of the conversations I have had with members across the country, particularly at our regional committee meetings, all have presented an overwhelmingly positive picture: our migrant workers are punctual, punctilious, personable and professional.

The government’s open door policy toward migrant workers from Eastern Europe has undoubtedly been a tremendous boon to our industry and the British economy as a whole.

Indeed, one might go so far as to say that this is one of the few instances where the government seems to have got it right for our industry.

However, the positive impact of our willing eastern European workforce highlights a growing tension with the shortcomings of a sometimes unwilling and often untrained British workforce.

While staffing shortages are not as much of an issue as they were prior to the enlargement of the EU, the long-term problem of skilled supervisory staff or qualified chefs, for example, remains.

It would be foolish to think that the continued influx of migrant workers can conceal the deep-seated difficulties we have in ensuring an influx of domestic employees who are skilled and trained into the market.

With the prospect of more migrant workers from the EU accession states of Bulgaria and Romania arriving in this country soon, coupled with a recent rise in unemployment among domestic workers, the case has been made for the imposition of temporary restrictions on the influx of workers from these two countries to allow for an absorption of the 400,000 new workers and to enable Britons to see the real benefit that these workers are bringing to our economy.

According to this argument, there is a danger that an open door policy for Bulgarian and Romanian workers from January 2007 could have a negative impact on over-stretched public services and local communities, particularly in areas of high unemployment.

The position of the BHA in respect to this argument is that we believe that there should be a pause and we would cite two reasons for this.

Firstly, migrant workers from these two new accession states should only be permitted entry if it can be proved that there is an existing shortage, such as for chefs, and that job applicants must have acceptable proven qualifications.

More importantly, this pause would ease the assimilation of our present immigrant population into the wider population of the UK and enable us to address the continued shortage of skills among our domestic population which continues to dissuade our industry from employing school-leavers.

Closing the door to skilled Bulgarian and Romanian hospitality workers would not benefit our industry – but neither will the continued lack of investment in skills and training among our young domestic population.