Interesting piece from the The Times.

Of course, any newspaper can find a few people to quote and conclude that a trend is underway…but there’s a logic to what is said here.



http: / /www .timesonline .co .uk /tol /news /uk /article3378851 .ece

Some quotes:

“Jarek Djano looked back six years to when he first arrived in England from the small village of Zamrow. “Each pound I sent back home could buy three or four loaves of bread. Now it can buy only one,” he said.

“Now I have to work six, seven days a week. Before I only worked five. It’s getting to be a strain on my wallet.”

“Inquiries from householders fell by 40 per cent in the last quarter of 2007, a result of the economic situation, the Federation of Master Builders said. “Consumers are being much more cautious about home improvement,” a spokesman said. “I’m expecting the results for the first quarter to be worse than the last three months of last year. We think it’s a direct result of the credit squeeze. The public’s uncertain about what’s going to happen with the economy and in these periods people hold back on working on their houses.

“Poland, by contrast, is enjoying a construction boom. Profits at PBG, a Polish building company, rose by two thirds in the fourth quarter of 2007 as the country prepares to host the 2012 European football championships. An expected 500,000 visitors have led to a massive renovation of the country’s sports complexes, road, airport and rail infrastructures, and tourist facilities. Polish builders are in high demand. “Lots of people are going back for Euro 2012,” Darek Osiak, 26, a gardener from Warsaw, said. “There’s building going on already. The economy is growing and people are very confident.”


£1 equals 7.23 Polish zloty (2004)

£1 equals 4.83 Polish zloty (2008)


But it’s worth noting the quote from head of marketing at Reed Employment who says the number of Poles entering the UK market is still strong.

So, what are the consequences of this, I wonder?

It’s got to be good for Poland where there is now a shortage of labour in many skilled areas - notably construction. And Polish corporate gross wages were up 11.5% the stats office says today. Meanwhile inflation is on the rise – 4.3% - and GDP growth is set to slow. More labour = less wage rise pressure, which is good for inflation.

More demand for Polish housing from these returnees?

And for the UK? I suspect others will follow where the Poles have led. The question is will they stay when they find the UK in the grip of economic pessimism at the least and a recession at worst?

The real state of affairs right now though is fairly hard to see, in my view. That picture will probably be a whole lot clearer in six to nine months time.

I wonder what others think?

Hi Robin

It’s a similar story in Ireland – I’m just back from a weekend at home and the story is the same with many of the “local” Poles now starting to make plans to go home.

There are also less people arriving into Ireland from Eastern Europe according statistics published in a recent article in the Irish Times:

Suggesting a calming in the flow of new migrants from central and eastern Europe, a comparison across the last quarter reveals that the number of Poles being issued with PPS numbers fell by more than one-third in 2007. It may reflect a wider pattern: Fás estimates that net migration will decline from 72,000 in 2007 to 38,000 this year.

Echoing the sentiments in the Times article yesterday, reasons for this are currency depreciation as well as economic with the Euro 2012 suggested as a major factor.

These people movements are also sensitive to shifting economic sands, and depreciation of the euro means that while the costs of emigration are still high, the relative pay-off has fallen. Combine this with rapid improvement in the Polish labour market - fed by shortages, economic growth, investment and the need to get its infrastructural house in order in time for Euro 2012, which Poland is co-hosting with Ukraine, and some of the reasons for Poles to leave start to ebb away.

There is a similar trend for other nationalities in Ireland also:

For Danguole Tautvydiene, a Lithuanian textile designer who has been in Ireland with her husband since 2002... she thought she'd never go back, but as the years passed, the subject slipped into the couple's conversations more frequently. "After four years, we started to think about going home. We left our families at home and we miss them." The couple have two sons - aged 5 and 10 - and although the kids are immersed in Irish ways outside the home, they speak their own language with their parents and attend the Lithuanian school on Saturdays. "It will be difficult for them, but I think it will turn out fine."
There are compelling reasons for Danguole and her compatriots to think seriously about returning home. In Lithuania, home to Ireland's third largest immigrant contingent after the UK and Poland, the unemployment rate is at four per cent and, when prime minister Gediminas Kirkilas visited Ireland last year, he spoke urgently of trying to lure his country's emigrants back. Danguole's husband works in construction: he's unlikely to be without work for long.

Whilst we do not have any concrete statistics of people returning back to Poland and where these people are heading to - we could assume this is to Warsaw and the larger cities and any increase will surely create a demand for housing in the local market

Noreen