Half of EU migrant workers have left the UK

Half of the one million EU migrants who have come to Britain since 2004 have already gone back home, a survey published today has revealed.

Improvements in migrants' home economies and Sterling's fall against the Euro and the Polish Zloty are thought to be making the UK a less attractive place to work.

And the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which released the findings in its report Floodgates or Turnstiles, also predicted that the number of migrant workers coming to Britain from the 10 new European Union members would slow as their economies improved.

"Four in ten of the returned Polish migrants we surveyed think that better employment prospects in Poland would encourage Poles living in the UK to return to Poland for good," the report said.

There were 665,000 people from the 10 new European states living in the UK in the final quarter of 2007, with 30,000 fewer arriving in the UK in the second half of 2007, as there were in the second half of 2006.

Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia - the so-called Accession Eight states - all joined the European Union in 2004. Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007.