Spain brain drain impacting UK and Germany

Most major UK cities now boast a sizeable Spanish contingent, most of whom are hard-working and entrepreneurial

Thousands of educated young professionals that have fled Spain over the past few years have pitched up mostly in the UK and Germany – helping to boost two economies that were already doing better than Spain’s own…

It is a political conundrum that politicians on all sides would rather do without. The European Union allows the free movement of labour between member states, something that has served British expats in Spain well over the past decade.

However, the direction of traffic is now much more even, with young, unemployed but well educated Spaniards upping sticks in their droves to seek out employment opportunities elsewhere in the EU – with the UK the favoured destination.

Figures from the EU stats office Eurostat have confirmed that Spain’s ‘Brain Drain’ is worse than previously thought. Between 2003 and 2014, there were 6,558 foreign applicants for work in Spain’s regulated fields of nursing, law, medicine and education. The majority of these professionals came to Spain from Germany and Italy.

However, traffic the other way has been far steeper. Over the same period, 18,408 Spanish professionals have applied to have their qualifications recognised in other European countries, revealing a negative balance of more than 12,000 people, making Spain the worst-hit Western European nation for brain drain.

Elsewhere in Europe, Poland, Romania and Greece suffer higher rates of brain drain, but Spain is quickly playing catchup – with the UK once more the preferred destination. Of that 18,408 figure of officially registered Spanish professionals overseas (the actual figure is much, much higher), there were 6,202 recognised secondary school teachers in the UK alone, as well as 887 recognised doctors.

Eurostat estimate that 55 per cent of Spaniards of working age who left Spain over the past decade have headed to the UK, followed way back by Germany with 10 per cent, then Italy with nine per cent.

Earlier this year, the UK’s published data showed that more than 51,000 Spaniards applied for national insurance in the country in 2013. For Germany, that figure was 36,511.

Although Spain’s economy has since picked up encouragingly, job creation has not yet followed, meaning that the trend of Spaniards moving to the UK may continue for some time yet.