Britain needs immigrant workers – why doesn’t the government get it?

The British government is being hoist by its own petard. For 13 years now it has been promising to bring down immigration. Yet this year immigration peaked at 606,000 – and still British industry is crying out for more workers.

As a result, the Government has to pretend to go through a process of “accessing” different sectors of the economy, to see which of them should get an exemption from the immigration rules and be allowed to bring in workers from overseas. That is done by the The Migration Advisory Committee, which advises the government on where the shortages are.

This week the government has had to add a number of construction industry jobs to its list of occupations where there is a shortage, and no chance of finding suitable British workers.

The list is not short – it covers bricklayers, masons, roofers, roof tilers, slaters, carpenters, joiners and plasterers. All of these sectors will benefit from cheaper visas and more relaxed employment criteria now they are on the list. The Home Office also added jobs in the fishing industry to the list, alongside connected “elementary agriculture occupations”. They can be paid just 80% of the job’s going rate and still get a visa for skilled workers. There is also a lower application fee, although they will need a job offer from a business willing to sponsor them. There is also an English test.

The Home Office says this will “aid the delivery of key national infrastructure and stimulate growth for related industries”. The usual anti-immigration voices have called for more training of British workers to fill these gaps, but the problem with that argument is that there are an awful lot of gaps.

For the government this is just the latest in a long line of industries which have been allowed to get around the foreign workers visa rules – there is a long list of sectors that want the same concessions. Hospitality is obviously hurting and yet has not been given an exemption. The list of sectors granted an exemption so far includes:

Care workers, care managers, architects, engineers (civil, chemical, mechanical, electronic, electrical, production and software), vets, IT workers, web designers, actuaries, economists, statisticians, dancers, artists, welders and lab technicians.

All of these workers can come to the country, but only at great expense and bother to their employers and themselves. Compare this to the pre-Brexit system when anyone from the EU could be hired with ease.

At some point the government will just have to admit that pretty much every part of the British economy is short of workers, that immigration rules are piling costs onto industries that are already under pressure and that this is slowing down recruitment and therefore economic activity.

Until then, we will have to endure the farce of a government cutting immigration, when it knows full well the British economy needs more immigrant workers.