Free movent of citizens

Questions and results

A Is it a benefit to EU citizens to be able to work anywhere within the European Union with minimal regulation of their movement?

B Do the economies of the member states of the EU benefit from having an extended pool of skills available to their economies from workers who are free to enter and leave as they are needed?

C Do you think that your state benefits from the recognition of qualifications of certain professionals (ie doctors, architects, etc) from certain countries, allowing those professionals to work in your home state?

D Should doctors of medicine with qualifications from one EU member states have those qualifications recognised in other EU member states?

E Is it appropriate for the European Union to develop legislation to enforce the recognition of professional qualifications, so as to allow employment throughout the member states.

F How many UK citizens do you believe are living or working elsewhere in the European Union?

G How many EU citizens (non-UK) do you believe are living or working in the UK?

Analysis

The free movement of persons is an integral part of the European Union, and is derived from the economic measures of the EC Treaty, the free movement of workers¹. Without these measures the European Union would inevitably be a very different proposition. Through the notion of EU citizenship² developed in the Maastricht Treaty, citizens of each member state, of each nation, become citizens of the EU supranational entity. This in turn has led to some confusion over the principles of free movement, clarified in Directive 2004/38 (enacted in the UK with The Immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2006, which addresses the rights of movement and residence of EU citizens – it makes clear that these rights are not the preserve of workers and their families, but of all citizens, including students and other economically inactive individuals. This effectively unravels the link between EU-based rights and economic activity – since EU citizenship becomes the key to unlocking such rights.

However, question A and B strictly address the issue of movement when applied to economically active workers. As a general outline question it appears that the EU respondents to question A are unequivocal, 100% believe that freedom to work anywhere in the EU is a benefit to them. The UK participants are less enthusiastic, but more than three-quarters of those responding did see the benefit of the free movement regulations.

Question B does not mention the EU explicitly, and here the EU respondents are very nearly unanimous, with the UK indicating over 70% support for the idea that their national economies benefit from imported skills. Without explicit EU reference this issue could equally address the skills of those coming from outside the EU – so there can be no clear conclusion as to whether the participants favoured intra- or extra-EU migration, or perhaps even both. From the immigration, extra-EU, position the policy in this area is largely dictated by EU legislation, particularly within the Schengen area.

Questions C-E represent a fairly straight-forward and non-controversial issue for both sets of respondents, the central issue being whether professional qualifications from one member state should be recognised in other member states. In each of the questions over 80% of UK respondents supported such recognition while over 90% of EU respondents supported such. From the perspective of the researchers this represents a failure in the main premise of the research, with no perceptible change in the support of this measure when the participation of EU institutions was introduced.

UK responses to this question may have been coloured by the recent case of a doctor practising in Germany who was sent as a locum to the UK, Daniel Ubani. He administered ten times the recommended dose of a drug to a patient, who subsequently died.

This area is governed by Directive 2005/36/EC on the recognition of professional qualifications. The aim of this measure is to facilitate the free movement of professionals between the member states. However, the recognition of qualifications themselves do not bring an automatic right to practice that profession in another member state – art 53 dictates that a sufficient knowledge of the languages in use in that state is also a requirement.

The final two questions in this section address the number of EU citizens actually taking advantage of this ability to move between member states. This question is addressed to UK respondents only, within a UK context – ie how many UK citizens are living or working in the EU, and how many EU citizens are living or working in the UK.

Originally we were given a figure of two million for each category: that is two million UK citizens living elsewhere in the EU, and two million EU citizens living in the UK. Consequently these were the figures that informed the options in questions F and G. Unfortunately these figures could not be verified, but with a considerable amount of research comparable figures were uncovered. For the EU migrants to the UK there are two sources, the EU’s Eurostat service, and the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). For 2008 Eurostat figures³ indicate 1.615 million EU citizens resident in the UK, while those of the ONS indicate 1.792 million for the period July 2008 – June 2009⁴. Of those indicated in the ONS figures 698,000 were from the A8⁵ member states. However, EU citizens living in the UK are outnumbered by those having citizenship from states outside the EU, these comprise 2.499 million of the UK population.

The corresponding data for UK citizens living elsewhere in the EU was much more difficult to find, as the Eurostat figures are incomplete⁶, and the ONS does not appear to have such data. Using a 2006 dataset published by the BBC, sourced from a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), reveals a figure of 1.675 million. Correlating this figure with the individual country data that is available through Eurostat for 2005–2008 shows that some of the Eurostat and IPPR data is very similar, but that some member state data is significantly different (including that of the Republic of Ireland and Spain, which have large populations of UK citizens – 100-200,000 for Ireland and 400-700,000 for Spain). The IPPR methodology is to use both official and unofficial data, since it believes that there is significant under-reporting in some member states (France and Spain are cited) – this may explain the discrepancy. However, the figures for UK citizens elsewhere in the EU are offered here without further comment on their veracity.

If the figures for both datasets are correct (and there are no others to rely upon), then the largest segment of respondents, 41% for both questions, guessed this correctly. The only other information that can be discerned from these results is that there was a tendency to under-estimate the number of UK citizens elsewhere in the UK (43%) and over-estimate the number of EU citizens resident in the UK (41%).

Although this segment addresses the notion of free movement, this does not however apply equally across the EU, the A8 members in 2004 and Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 (EU-2) are subject to transitional measures⁷ available to the then pre-existing member states to restrict the movement of A8 and EU-2 citizens. This restriction can last up to seven years. The only EU-15 states not to place restrictions on the A8 member states were the Republic of Ireland, Sweden and the UK. However, this position was not maintained with the EU-2 where Finland and Sweden were the only members of the EU-15 not to impose restrictions.