Until the early 21st century, the movement of international migrants into rural areas of Britain had been a limited feature of any population gains. However, the arrival of migrant workers subsequent, in particular, to the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 significantly reshaped the patterns of international migration flows. A key dimension of these movements was their scale. For the first time, many rural localities in Britain hosted significant migrant populations (Robinson and Reeve, 2006). Similarly, the Commission on Integration and Cohesion (2007) highlighted that the particular challenges facing rural localities were due to the ‘newness of diversity’in these areas, which had previously seen very little in the way of ethnically diverse populations.

Reviews of the impact of migrant workers have identified a range of factors affecting the workers themselves, and also the broader impacts on the communities where they live and work (see for example, Rolfe and Metcalf, 2009). Whilst such issues include services, employment, social activities and community cohesion, the focus of this chapter is upon the housing implications of flows of Accession Eight (A8) migrant workers both for rural localities and for the migrants themselves. Whilst the largest number of international migrants in rural areas was drawn from the 15 countries that comprised the European Union prior to 2004, the fastest growth was amongst migrants from the new A8 countries, who, in proportional terms, focused as much on rural localities as urban areas (Chappell et al, 2009).

A8 migrant workers in rural localities of Britain

The A8 countries, comprising Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Slovakia, joined the European Union in 2004. Traditionally, migrant workers tended to concentrate in London and the South East of England. The precise number of A8 migrant workers in rural localities, as with other groups of international migrants, is difficult to pin down precisely because of shortcomings with the various data sets that are available. All A8 migrant workers are supposed to sign up with the Workers’ Registration Scheme (WRS), and it is this source of data that has primarily been used to map their destinations in the secondary analyses that have been undertaken.

A review by the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC, 2007b), for example, noted that A8 migrant workers in rural areas of England had tended to focus on particular localities, the data pointing to clusters in the counties of Herefordshire, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Yorkshire, Somerset and Devon.