Plaster on, plaster off… plaster on again?

By Damian Walters, BiKBBI CEO

This morning Sir Keir Starmer unveiled another government master plan on the topic of immigration, but choosing this time to include the widening skills gap within his white paper proposals for change.

Whilst I wholly accept that immigration, not to be confused with illegal immigration, will play a positive role in filling the skilled labour shortages in the UK, I can’t help but feel that the much bigger problem is the fact that we have, for decades, neglected the development of our own homegrown vocational workforce and that by including the topic within the latest immigration proposals, has the potential mask the real issue.

As I said back in 2016 when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Economic Union, valuable migrated skilled labour was already masking a festering British problem – trade neglect.
I know the government has already made proposals for change elsewhere, with a long-overdue focus on apprenticeships being a key mandate, but I feel that perhaps the government is joining the subjects within the same white paper to gain political points, when they should be focused on fixing the root of the problem.

Short term, yes. Allow legitimate, tax-paying, migrated skilled labour to plug the gaps, but a medium-to-long-term strategy must be on growing our own talent and there are some huge social economic obstacles that remain stubborn and very much in the way. Are parents supportive of their children embarking on a trade over an academic career pathway and, more so, what’s in it for the current workforce? Because, right now, I’m not sure they really understand the benefits for them… and I don’t blame them!

Small businesses need support to embrace apprenticeships, whether that’s financial incentives, or if it’s simplifying a complex process to take on an apprentice. By all means fix the immigration issues (because they need fixing), but please don’t lose sight of why the skills gap is evident. I simply fear that today’s announcement is confusing the real issue here.