Hotel chief: British staff are unemployable compared to bright, smiling and hardworking Poles

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Bob Cotton, chief executive of the British Hospitality Association - representing 40,000 hotels, restaurants and caterers - said it was a "no brainer" whether employers in his industry hired a Pole or a Briton.

He told a Parliamentary inquiry into tourism: "People have got to want to turn up every day...

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About 1.2m people employed by BHA members are from overseas

"The local people, we find, do not have the motivation to turn up each day and once they've worked 15 hours a week their benefits start to be removed - so there's no motivation to want to work more than 15 hours.

"If you're an employer and have a keen person from Poland, who is bright, smiling, wants to work, who turns up every day, will work 45 to 50 hours a week against a person who turns up one day, doesn't turn up the next, isn't really interested, it's a no-brainer.

"The people who we've had from central Europe are the best source of labour this industry has had for a hundred years.

"They've done more to improve standards in our industry than anything from our local schools and colleges."

Last night he told The Mail on Sunday that his industry considered British applicants "unemployable".

He added: "You don't need enormous skills to be a waiter or a chambermaid, just the motivation to work."

But Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price, who has campaigned against using cheap foreign labour, said: "For this man, who is the chief spokesman of Britain's hotels, to write off British workers like this is astonishing.

"The problem isn't that British workers can't do the job, it's that this sector pays a pittance not a living wage. It is utterly unsustainable to rely on foreign labour that will one day dry up."

About 1.2million out of the 1.8million workers employed by BHA members are now from overseas.

In London, 83 per cent of the 350,000 staff working for the organisation's London membership are migrants.

Department of Work and Pensions statistics puts the number of foreign-born people working in Britain today at 2.4million.