The boss of a sofa factory that the home secretary has claimed recruited “almost exclusively” from Romania and Poland has said 75% of his workforce is British.

Matt O’Flynn, the managing director of Collins and Hayes in the home secretary’s Hastings constituency, said he was “very disappointed” when Amber Rudd cited his firm on Wednesday as an example of a company that relied too heavily on overseas staff and “didn’t even consider training locally”.

Rudd has faced a strong backlash from business after she confirmed that the Home Office was considering requiring companies to declare the proportion of international staff in their workforce. Ministers were said to want to see lists of companies published and those employers with the highest proportions of foreign staff “named and shamed” for not employing British people when they could.

The home secretary cited the unnamed sofa company to highlight her case, saying: “I went and visited a factory quite recently where they recruit almost exclusively from Romania and Poland, where they have people who have experience in factories building these sofas that they have. They didn’t even consider training locally – there was a college they could have worked with, but they choose to recruit outside the UK.”

O’Flynn told the BBC Today programme on Thursday that Rudd had visited his factory in 2015 but said he was “very disappointed” with her claim, saying he had invited her as his local MP to discuss how they could recruit more sewing machinists.

“We are very committed to working with the local community to bring in as much local talent as we possible can,” he said.



“I would say 75% of our employees are British. Whenever we have an increase in demand we have to bring in some skilled workers. In one of our departments we have a higher degree of foreign nationals than we do elsewhere in the business; that is the only area that I can think of where Amber may be getting her figures from,” he said.

He said it was commonplace in the furniture industry to hire staff from abroad when there was a surge in demand. Collins and Hayes, which supplies John Lewis and Furniture Village, has been making furniture for 140 years.

Some of the problems involved in requiring companies to declare the proportion of non-British staff on their books was highlighted by a recent Commons written answer in which the Home Office admitted it could not provide the information about its own employees.



Asked by Labour’s Chuka Umunna how many citizens of other EU countries were employed by the Home Office, the immigration minister, Robert Goodwill, told him that while they did carry out proper checks on potential recruits, “the Home Office does not record the nationality of employees on our IT systems and is unable to provide this information.”

The embarrassment for the home secretary comes as the government has had to try to reassure parents that a request to schools to collect data on the nationality of pupils would not be passed on to immigration officials.

The Department for Education said: “Collecting this data will be used to help us better understand how children with, for example, English as an additional language, perform in terms of their broader education, and to assess and monitor the scale and impact immigration may be having on the schools sector.



“Data on pupils’ country of birth, nationality and level of English proficiency is collected through the school census in line with the national population census.

“These data items will not be passed to the Home Office. They are solely for internal DfE use for analysis, statistics and research,” it adds.



The Department for Education asked schools in June to send out requests from this month to parents for details of their children’s place of birth and nationality to help manage the impact of migration on schools. The June guidance made clear that it should be done on a voluntary basis and parents could opt out.

But an investigation by Schools Week showed that some schools have misinterpreted the data-collection rules and asking pupils for copies of passports and if they were asylum seekers.

A coalition of human rights groups has also called for a boycott of the extra census details amid fears that the information could be handed over to Home Office immigration enforcement officers. They say that there have already been cases of such “data sharing” with the Home Office as part of a drive to create a “hostile environment for illegal immigrants”.



“Such measures deter vulnerable children and families from accessing essential services, exercising their human rights, and participating on an equal basis in our communities,” the campaigners said in a letter to the education secretary, Justine Greening, asking her to axe the plans.

On Tuesday the home secretary said in her Tory party conference speech that private landlords could face imprisonment from December if they rented homes to illegal immigrants under new public-sector legislation that includes requiring health bodies and banks to make immigration checks.





