Saturday’s European Policy Forum in Sheffield was a great success with over 100 people in attendance and everything from the Tinsley towers to climate change in Kenya discussed.

The forum gives myself and my colleague Linda McAvan MEP the chance to report back about our work in the Parliament and what we achieved over the last year.

Two other themes of this year’s event were multiculturalism and migration with Dutch MEP Jan Marinus Wiersma speaking about the former and TUC Regional Secretary Bill Adams talking about the latter.

Like the UK, Holland is in a debate about multiculturalism, which became highly charged following the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a religious fundamentalist, and Jan Marinus stressed how dangerous the current, narrow, media-spun view of Islam is. Yet, positive role models, like PSV Eindhoven football player Ismaïl Aissati are helping Holland understand and talk about Islam away from the stereotypes that so normally abound.

The afternoon then focused on migration with Linda's researcher, Chris Read, offering a plethora of statistics which gave an illuminating portratit of the current situation in the UK.

Of the eastern-European migrants that have come to the UK, 82 per cent are aged between 18 and 34 with 93 per cent arriving with no dependents. The most common statistic banded about by the media is that there is thought to be 600,000 migrants from eastern-European EU countries in the UK but one example of how statistics can be misleading is the fact that those leaving are not even counted!

Most worrying though is the fact that 78 per cent only earn between £4.50 (which is of course well below the minimum wage) and £5.99 an hour.

Bill Adams then concentrated on the problems some eastern-European immigrants have suffered and left much of the room shocked at the levels of exploitation by unscrupulous employers occurring in this country.

One of many horror stories featured an agency which charged so much money for signing-on fees, administration and rent (for a bed in a room with up to eight others) that some workers were left with a big fat zero in their pay packet. Not wanting to miss another insidious trick the agency then offered the exploited workers loans with exorbitant interest rates. Other agencies have been telling workers that joining a trade union is illegal.

As I have mentioned before on the blog the trade unions are aware of the problems and have taken the lead to inform migrants and British workers about their rights.

But these incidents also show why we need to agree on the proposed EU Temporary Agency Directive, which has been held up for some time by deadlock between governments in the EU Council of Ministers. It's high time for movement on this issue!