A number of Romanians have been taken on by Falmouth Docks only days after their country officially became a member of the EU.

There are also understood to already be more than 60 Polish workers at the docks but this latest influx has considerably increased the number of foreign workers.

It is not unusual for A & P Falmouth, who own the docks, to employ Polish workers.

They come from shipyards in Poland and are recognised as good workers although their rates of pay are lower than their British counterparts.

Unofficial sources revealed that there are around 30 Romanian workers and 60 Polish workers working at the docks this week.

Falmouth docks offers on-site engineering, electrical, paint and fabrication workshops for the ship repair business but yesterday it was not clear what the Romanians were being employed as.

Mike Reynolds, port operations director at A & P, said: "We do employ foreign nationals and people know that, but I do not know exactly how many there are working for us and from what countries they come from.

"We take on workers from other countries when we can't find people with the necessary skills that we require locally, such as welders, and people with specific electrical skills related to our business.

"Often we find ourselves short of people with these skills and the only way we can get them is to employ people from other countries."

It was unclear yesterday if that meant casual workers in the local community were losing out to cheaper labour provided by the influx of eastern Europeans.

Mr Reynolds added: "I do not know anything about their rates of pay or whether they are likely to be taking jobs from the casual workers that we use regularly in the docks. It is simply a case of us needing people with specific skills to get the job done."

The workers are employed through an agency called EAP based in Leicestershire. Steve Jones, director of the agency, said: "There are number of Polish and Romanian workers at A&P. However, we do not normally court press coverage of our business but I would say there are nowhere near 30 Romanian people working at A&P. There is probably about a third of that figure."

Falmouth docks employ 300 hundred workers locally and also have a number of casuals from the area who are taken on whenever the yard has extra work.

Falmouth is one of the largest deep water harbours in the world and the town has the largest ship repair complex in the UK with three large graving docks and extensive alongside deepwater berthing providing capacity for vessels up to 100,000 tonnes.

Plans were announced last year to develop the docks and create a 400m long berth for luxury cruise ships, which it is estimated will allow at least 100,000 passengers to visit Falmouth each year.

If the plans are given the go-ahead, spring 2009 was being given as a tentative date for completion. The construction work itself would only take around nine months.

The employment of Romania workers comes at the same time as others along with Bulgarians arrived in Cornwall for flower picking jobs in and around the Falmouth, Helston and Camborne area. Flower pickers get paide £5 for each box which takes 80 bunches of flowers to fill.