I try to avoid the dreaded “B” word in my blogs but on this occasion, I can’t avoid it as the chorus of business voices highlighting skills shortages and recruitment problems grows larger and louder.
It is no good for Government to assert that it will all be fine once negotiations on the UK’s leaving the EU are concluded when the situation is no clearer now than it was when all this started almost two years ago.
Somehow, businesses need to carry on in the interim as well as planning for the future. Some things just cannot wait and high on the list is where and how they are going to source the people they need at all skill levels, whether or not they trade abroad.
Some facts about skills shortages and recruitment problems
Firstly, the most recent complete set of immigration figures, published by the ONS (Office for National Statistics) showed that, in 2017, more EU citizens, 139,000, left the UK than came here to work, 101,000. This was the lowest level for five years.
The independent “think tank” Global Futures calculated that the fall in immigration since the decision to leave the EU was already costing the UK public finances more than £1 billion per year and research by Scott-Moncrieff found that 51% of SMEs put Brexit at the forefront of their worries, with even those not trading abroad linking it to a decline in spending and to skills shortages.
This translates on the ground to data from the West Midlands Chambers of Commerce revealing in their quarterly report that 53% of their members were reporting recruiting difficulties and YouGov figures reporting that 23% could not retain EU nationals.
In East Anglia, the business section of one regional paper highlighted interviews with SMEs, one of them with a small local electrical contractor who had been searching fruitlessly for qualified new recruits for five months.
Equally, there are regular reports of a shortage of nurses, doctors and other health care professionals in the NHS and care homes too are finding it hard to get staff.
I have noted in past blogs the sectors where qualified people have been in short supply for many months, including in construction, the Tech sector and in engineering. The Daily Telegraph has calculated that half of all postgraduates skilled in AI had migrated overseas, 33% to leading US tech firms, 11% to North American universities and 9% to smaller US businesses – a new “brain drain” in the making?
As far back as July the Independent was reporting that six in 10 businesses have had to spend money on extra incentives, pay rises and bonuses ranging in value between £5,000 and £100,000 to persuade skilled EU workers to work for them.
What action has there been to address skills shortages and recruitment problems?
Doubtless the Government, if challenged, would say that it is listening to businesses although the message does not seem to be getting through or is being treated with some scepticism.
Given that the UK has near-full employment, even unskilled workers may be able to command a premium and there have already been warnings from farmers that recruiting enough seasonal fruit and veg pickers is a serious problem.
In late August the Home Office announced that it had developed an online “toolkit” to help UK employers to register EU citizens with a new immigration status following Brexit and to help those citizens to get their new immigration status. This has yet to be tested and given the government’s less than stellar track record on commissioning new IT solutions it remains to be seen whether it will be user friendly.
Then there is the apprenticeship levy and the Government’s target of having 3 million new apprenticeships in place by 2020. This has hardly been a resounding success with the numbers of places having slumped over the nine months of the 2017-18 academic year by 34% compared to the previous nine months. Last week the FSB (Federation of Small Businesses) revealed that there had been a further slump in new apprenticeships in the year to June, down by 28%.
Not surprisingly, the FSB, the CBI (Confederation of British Industry), the IoD (Institute of Directors) and the BCC (British Chambers of Commerce) have all called for the scheme’s urgent reform.
The question is whether the Government will do more than “listen” to business concerns and actually do something practical that works.