Newsnight polls of Bulgaria and Romania

Newsnight has made a bold attempt at actually commissioning some polling to try and shed some light on whether there will be substantial immigration to Britain from Bulgaria and Romania once restrictions are lifted at the end of this year, commissioning polls from Vitosha in Bulgaria and Gallup in Romania to find out what proportion of Bulgarian and Romanian people actually are likely to move to Britain.

Let's start with the Bulgarian survey. 37% of Bulgarians said that in the last 5 years they had considered moving to live and work abroad. "Consider" is a fairly low bar to begin with though, does sitting back and pondering whether it would be quite nice to live in the south of France count as "considering moving to live abroad", or does it require serious consideration? To put this in context, in 2012 YouGov found 6% of British people are actively considering moving abroad and 42% would seriously consider doing so. Have half the British population actually upped sticks and left? Of course not, for most of those people it was an idle whim or a pipe dream. No doubt it is the same for most of those Romanians and Bulgarians surveyed.

To try and set the bar a bit higher, therefore, Vitosha and Gallup asked people whether they had any actual plans to move aboard, 31% said they intended to go and work abroad in either 2013 or 2014. 19% said they are looking for work abroad, 15% they have actually started to prepare plans to work abroad.

The next consideration is whether those people are looking to move to Britain - there are, after all, several other countries in the EU! Asked where they are planning to go, just under of third of those intending to go to seek work abroad in 2013 or 2014 said Britain (it looks as though they could say more than one place) - equating to 9% of the total sample.

This is still largely just measuring aspiration though, so the poll then asked if they have made any concrete preparations for the move, 52% said they had, 47% had not (in terms of what this meant, a majority said they made been in contact with someone working in Britain, half said they had looked for a job there through a recruiting agency, 16% that they'd looked for somewhere to live). What it boils down to is that just under 3% of Bulgarians say they have looked for a job in the UK through a recruitment agency, just over 1% without.

The working age population of Bulgaria is just under 5 million, so in the unlikely event that all those Bulgarians who have enquired about job opportunities in Britain find one (and the majority of respondents said they were only interested in moving if there was a firm job offer, hardly anyone said they were planning on moving speculatively), it would equate to something under 200,000 Bulgarians.

The Romanian survey was structured in much the same way, though there was less interest there in moving to the UK (the most popular destinations for would-be Romanian emmigrants were Italy and Germany) and those that did mention the UK as their favoured location were less likely to have actually made any concrete plans. Only just over 1% of Romanians had made any attempt to enquire about job opportunities in the UK.

The working age population of Romania is about 15 million, so in the equally unlikely event that all those Romanians who have enquired about job opportunities in Britain found one, it would equate to something under 150,000 Romanians moving to the UK.

I would still urge a lot of caution with even these figures. The margin of error on a normal poll of 1000 is plus or minus 3%, so one should hardly read too much into figures of about 4% and about 1%. Equally people will naturally overestimate their likelihood of taking major life changing decisions - it is far easier to ring up a recruitment agency and ask if they have any jobs going in Britain than it is to actually uproot your life and move to a foreign country, far easier to look for a job than it is to find one. What we can say with some certainly is that bonkers claims about half the entire population of Bulgaria and Romania moving to the UK are, indeed, still bonkers.