Labour and Skills Shortages: Temporary Recovery Visa

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of a temporary recovery visa for industries experiencing labour and skills shortages.

It is a privilege to serve under your guidance, Mrs Cummins. Before I start, I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and the support provided to my office by the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy project.

As the UK faces its longest recession on record, it is the Government’s duty to pull every lever they have to prevent hardship and support businesses, workers, families and the economy as a whole. My contention is that to do otherwise would be reckless, foolish and, indeed, heartless. It is great to see the Minister in his place and I welcome him to his important role. My plea today is for him to recognise the clear fact that hospitality and tourism businesses in my constituency in Cumbria are unable to operate to their full capacity because, despite their best efforts, they cannot recruit sufficient workers.

A recent survey by Cumbria Tourism, our excellent destination management organisation, found that 73% of businesses say recruitment is a problem, with more than half citing it as a significant problem. A lack of job applicants is an issue for 78% of employers. As I listen to employers right across Cumbria—the lakes, the dales and other beautiful parts of the county that are in neither—it is painfully clear that the situation is limiting business capacity and profitability, and forcing temporary or partial closures for almost half of all businesses.

Sadly, it is likely that anyone who has visited the Lake district on holiday, particularly in the last couple of years, saw reduced opening hours and capacity in cafés, hotels, restaurants and other visitor attractions, simply because they do not have sufficient staff. Those businesses came through the challenges of covid despite the odds, adapting to the drop in visitor numbers, but they have since been hit by massive problems with recruitment.

The backdrop to the issue is that Cumbria has a smaller than average working-age population, with 61% of people of working age compared with the rest of England’s 64%. It also has lower unemployment than the national average, at 1.5% versus 3.7%. The reality is that we just do not have the people to fill the vacancies. Some 80% of the entire working-age population in the Lake district already works in hospitality and tourism.

In the years that I have been raising the issue with the Government, I have been told repeatedly that the answer lies with the education and training of our UK workforce. A national cross-departmental skills strategy would, indeed, seem to be a reasonable and sensible development. Moreover, we do not want high domestic unemployment while employers take on migrant workers. However, that is not happening, and there is no prospect whatsoever of it happening. Instead, we have very low unemployment locally, so employers in Cumbria have spent the last two years trying a range of things to attract workers, such as increasing wages, adding benefits, providing more training, offering better hours or acquiring accommodation for staff to live in on site.

Cumbria Tourism and individual tourism businesses right across our county continue to work closely with the Department for Work and Pensions, supporting careers events and working with partners to engage directly with schools and colleges. Despite all those initiatives, businesses in our Cumbrian communities are struggling to survive and many are having to close altogether. How tragic it is that we can see the demand and the profit that could be made, or the losses that could be avoided, yet we cannot meet that demand because we do not have the workforce.

Although the lakes and dales of Cumbria have an acute problem, labour shortages are a nationwide challenge. That means that there is not a big reservoir of untapped talent in the UK that might move for work. We therefore need a range of solutions, and short, medium and long-term migration has to be part of that. We have a choice. If we do nothing to change the status quo, many businesses will go under, and then we will have an unemployment problem and rural communities will fall into decline. It could be argued that the market will adapt and that is just the way of things. However, the Government must take responsibility for having interfered to undermine the free market. While land tends not to be all that mobile, capital and labour do tend to be, or at least they were until the Government chose to inflict harm on our economy by cutting off the supply and movement of labour. The party allegedly of the free market has become the dead hand that is killing our economy locally and nationally.

It does not need to be that way. The question is, do we want thriving tourist destinations outside London? Do we want them to continue to be able to offer a fantastic experience for tourists from home and abroad? Do we want that contribution to our economy? Domestic and inbound tourism combined contribute approximately £127 billion a year to the UK economy. Tourism is worth 9% of GDP and is our fourth biggest employer. As we face a self-inflicted Conservative recession, do we think that it might be a good idea to back an industry that is chomping at the bit to mitigate that recession to grow and thrive?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes—and surely it is—then, if we want real, sustainable economic growth and are serious about levelling up, we cannot close our eyes to the stultifying impact of labour shortages. By the way, a Conservative Government that understood and cared about business would not need anyone to tell them that; it would be obvious to them. Such a Government would also know that welcoming migrant workers into areas such as mine, to complement the local workforce, is part of the action that needs to be taken.

The current work visa situation does not support the labour needs of the Lake district. Again, the Government would know that if they listened to Cumbrian businesses. We need a visa like the youth mobility scheme, which is flexible across sectors. Of course, that scheme already exists for places such as Australia and New Zealand, whose populations are fairly small—places that, to misquote “Father Ted”, are small and far away. How about also developing youth mobility visa agreements with countries whose populations are large and much closer geographically? The youth mobility visa would provide greater work protections than sector-based schemes, so that workers are not tied to a specific employer. The Government could easily impose restrictions on workers’ rights to access benefits, to bring in dependants, or to remain in the UK long term.

In my correspondence last month with the former Minister, the hon. Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove), he stated that that there were ongoing negotiations with both European and wider international partner countries for youth mobility scheme agreements. That was encouraging news. I had a similar response from his predecessor, the hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster), when I met him earlier this year alongside lakes tourism and industry leaders.

Please will the Minister tell us the timescale for those negotiations? Will new schemes be available in time for the beginning of the 2023 season? If the negotiations are stalling because we are seeking bilateral agreements, which may be slowing down progress, could the Minister set out whether unilateral agreements are being considered, given the desperate need of our tourism economy?

The former Minister, the hon. Member for Corby, also stated in his letter that employment is not the primary purpose of the youth mobility visa, and that young people cannot be compelled to work in specific sectors or regions. I did, of course, know those things. However, people who come in through a youth mobility visa will no doubt be seeking employment. We want to give them opportunities in desirable areas such as the Lake district while allowing our economy to benefit. That is exactly how it has happened in the past; migrants have chosen to come to the Lake district and the Yorkshire dales to work, often with accommodation provided.

The Government have made much of the claim that we in Britain can control our borders, but surely we want to control our borders in our own interests, in a way that gives us an advantage, rather than to do ourselves pointless economic harm. The youth mobility scheme enables the Government to control migration and make use of an existing mechanism to bring in those who will allow our businesses to thrive and meet demand, while developing an effective national skills strategy to maximise benefits to the domestic workforce. It is a win-win.

If the Government are not willing to take advantage of that win-win, Cumbrian businesses will demand to know why they are choosing to do active harm to them and our wider economy, rather than taking action that would help them. While employers can make changes to their employment offers—and they really are doing so—a national strategy of skills development, linked to labour market needs, must be led by the Government. The onus cannot be on small and medium-sized enterprises. The Government have to make a choice: if they do not accept that migration is part of the solution to labour shortages, then reduced economic growth, business failure, and poverty is the choice they have made.

In its report, “Promoting Britain abroad,” published last month, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee stated:

“We welcome efforts to create apprenticeships and the new T-Level in Catering in 2023 but believe that more could be done to support business-owners who are short of staff today.”

The Committee then recommended that the Government

“should introduce a temporary recovery visa for industries where there is clear evidence of labour and skills shortages.”

Does the Minister agree with the DCMS Committee on that, and will he introduce a temporary recovery visa?

In the context of a lack of people to fill vacancies, there is, of course, another lever that the Minister could pull. It is staring him right in the face. We have more than 85,000 people who have been waiting more than six months for their asylum claim to be decided and who are banned from working. Many of those awaiting a decision are ready and able to work. It makes absolutely no sense that the Government would prefer them to rely on state support instead of keeping their skills alive.

Forcing people into inactivity is at complete odds with the Government’s stated policy aim to move people away from dependency and into work. Getting into employment at the earliest opportunity will put those people in a much better position to integrate and flourish in the UK when they receive their refugee status—and 76% of them will be given that status by this Government. Giving asylum seekers the right to work would mean that they pay their own way, rather than relying on state finance. It would save the taxpayer millions. There is literally no downside.

Last week, I visited asylum seekers housed in hotels in Cumbria. Some 130 of them are living in limbo, unable to work while they await a decision on their asylum claims. They are from Eritrea, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran—all places with high grant rates. Their professions are catering, architecture, agriculture, construction, aircraft engineering, welding, senior logistics and data analysis, to name just a few. It makes no sense that they cannot work where local employers have vacancies. Public opinion is supportive: a YouGov poll in March found that 81% of the population would support an asylum seeker’s having the right to work after they have been waiting for six months.

It is plainly not the case, as some have said, that that policy would be a pull factor. We are an outlier in having such a foolish policy. Look at all comparable countries in Europe: France grants permission to work after a six-month wait; Germany does so after three months. A six-month wait would safeguard against economic migrants using the asylum system to circumvent the work visa process. Given the current economic climate, the clamouring of our employers, workforce shortages—not just in my communities but elsewhere—and the backlog in the asylum process, will the Minister reconsider the right to work for asylum seekers, as many of his Conservative colleagues believe he should?

There are, of course, other reasons that Cumbria’s workforce has been so drastically reduced in recent times. The other main factor is the rapid growth in second home ownership in our communities and the collapse of the long-term private rented sector into the short-term Airbnb market. Housing for people who are not wealthy in our area has become such a rarity that hundreds who worked in hospitality and tourism have simply been evicted from their homes and ejected from their communities. It is tragic. I hope the Minister will back my amendments to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, which would enable us to guarantee sufficient homes for local people and families by limiting the number of second homes and short-term lets in communities like mine.

The Government’s inaction in tackling the housing crisis is compounding their failure to look intelligently and pragmatically at the matter of visas. This all adds up to a situation where 63% of tourism businesses in communities in Cumbria are working below capacity because they cannot find staff. There is demand, but we cannot meet it. The Government have chosen to allow the growth of Airbnb to eject our domestic workforce and counterproductive visa rules to prevent overseas staff from supplementing our small labour pool.

After London, the lakes is the second biggest visitor destination in the country; at the same time, we have one of the smallest populations. Of course we need to bring in outside talent to work alongside our own; otherwise, the Lake district and Yorkshire dales economies just could not function. I ask the Minister to stop hamstringing our economy, listen to our businesses and adopt a pragmatic approach to addressing labour shortages in the UK, especially in rural communities such as mine.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Farron]

I am grateful to you for overseeing the debate, Mrs Cummins.

I thank the Minister for that offer. Let me cut to the chase: yes, we would love to have a meeting with the tourism leaders for the lakes and the rest of Cumbria Tourism to talk about all the practicalities.

The tone of the debate was good. It is a low bar, I am afraid, but at least there has not been any incendiary language about foreigners and asylum seekers flooding our shores and all the rest of that nonsense, although I did disagree with some of the things that others said.

The right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel) made some good points about us training our own staff and ensuring that we develop young people’s talent. In my part of the world, Kendal College has certainly added massive value for young people so that they can set up a career in the Lake district. We should not see hospitality just as something that is menial and low paid; it is a real career trajectory that people can follow.

My more general concern about the Government’s position is that they have allowed political considerations to overwhelm economic and practical ones. If someone trying to run a business in the Lake district has a workforce problem, that is partly—maybe mostly—caused by the housing disaster, which the Government need to get a grip of, but it is in no small part also caused by inflexibility on migration. It needs to be something that is reciprocal, whereby we give people a reasonable length of time here so that they can contribute. That is what businesses want; I hope the Minister will listen to them.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the matter of a temporary recovery visa for industries experiencing labour and skills shortages.