Photo: Flickr.

Britain’s Conservative government is facing political heavy weather over the sharp rise in immigration recorded over the last year, including a major spike in the numbers of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to the UK.

Some 269,000 EU migrants moved to the UK over the last year up till March, a quarter more than in 2014, 53,000 of whom came from Romania and Bulgaria – almost double the figure from 2014.

The news has buffeted David Cameron’s government, which pledged to sharply cut immigration to “the tens of thousands”.

It comes after the last curbs on Romanians and Bulgarians working in the UK were lifted on January 1 2014.

The UK Immigration Minister, James Brokenshire, called the new figures “deeply disappointing” and blamed UK businesses for becoming over-reliant on migrant labour, while Nigel Farage, head of the anti-immigration UKIP party, said they reflected the “total impotence of the British government”.

The controversial rise in the level of immigration underpins the UK government’s reluctance to take in more than a few of the hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers now reaching Western Europe via the Balkans.

Germany expects to receive 800,000 asylum requests this year. In the UK, the estimated figure is around 25,000.

Polish is now the most common non-British nationality, with 853,000 residents, including those born in the UK, describing their nationality as Polish.