Take Tesco. A good employer and an important source of jobs in Britain. They take on young people, operate apprenticeships and training schemes and often recruit unemployed or disabled staff through job centres.

 

Yet when a distribution centre was moved to a new location， existing staff said they would have lost out by transferring and the result was a higher proportion of staff at the new site from A8 countries taking up the jobs.

 

Tesco are clear that they have tried to recruit locally. And I hope they can provide more reassurance for their existing staff. But the fact that staff are raising concern shows how sensitive the issue has become.

 

Some companies have found themselves far more heavily affected.

 

Next PLC recruited extra temporary staff for their South Elmsall warehouse for the summer sale - last year and this year.

 

Now South Elmsall is in a region with 9% unemployment and 23.8% youth unemployment.

 

Yet several hundred people were recruited directly from Poland. The recruitment agency Next used,called Flame, has its web-site, www.flamejobs.pl, entirely in Polish.

 

Now of course short term contracts and work are sometimes necessary in order to satisfy seasonal spikes in demand.

 

But when agencies bring such a large number of workers of a specific nationality at a time when there are one million young unemployed in Britain it is right,surely, to ask why that is happening.

 

Now, many employers say they prefer to take on foreign workers. They have lots of get up and go, they say. They are reliable. They turn up and they work hard.

 

But I've heard examples from across the country where employers appear to have made a deliberate decision not to provide training to local young people but to cut pay and conditions and to recruit from abroad instead, or to use tied accommodation and undercut the minimum wage.

 

It may be the case, as some have argued, that many young people discount hospitality or care industries as beneath them, but in many other countries a job in a hotel is not a dead end or a gap year stopgap but the start of a rewarding career. Tourism is one of our largest industries and yet I have heard horror tales of hotel management deliberately cutting hours of young British workers and adding hours to migrant workers who do not complain about deductions from earnings that almost certainly take people below their national minimum wage.