I HAVE NEVER been to Gosberton, but if it is anything like the other meanly-built villages I have driven through in the Lincolnshire fens I would have thought a hacienda-style villa with marble floors and a water garden would cheer the place up a bit. Not that Holland District Council’s planners quite saw things that way: on Wednesday they demolished a migrant workers’ hostel that a Greek-American gangmaster, Alan Garrard, had erected without planning permission.
We do not like it when foreigners come to Britain to scrounge off the state, but it seems that we like it even less when they practise self-reliance. Britain is a “soft touch” for immigrants, moaned one of the local residents who turned up to cheer on the bulldozers. Yet the migrant workers, who hail from Latvia and Lithuania, were not costing taxpayers a penny. They had paid for their journey to Britain, were supporting themselves by picking flowers and vegetables and living in accommodation which had been built entirely with Mr Garrard’s money. Moreover, like all migrant workers from the new EU member states, they are not eligible for unemployment benefit or income support.
The upshot of Holland District Council’s demolition job, however, is that the migrant workers will now have to be rehoused by the local authority at taxpayers’ expense. They will be put up on council estates in Boston or Spalding, occupying homes which would otherwise be available for local people. Alternatively, the workers will go home, depriving the market gardeners of labour which, at a time of near full employment, will be impossible to replace.
Of course no council can allow flagrant breaches of planning laws. But the rules have become far too unresponsive to the labour market and far too biased in favour of Nimbys. It is little wonder that Mr Garrard did not apply for planning permission for his hostel: you can just imagine the truckload of angry letters which would have arrived at the council offices had signs gone up announcing an application “for the erection of a migrant workers’ hostel”.
Surely there could have been room for a little pragmatism. Without migrant workers there would be no British-grown fruit or vegetables. And gangmasters such as Mr Garrard who put them up in marble-clad hostels rather than stuffing them 50 to an illegally-sublet council house deserve to be encouraged.