The jobs British workers don’t want to do — and why

So what are the key issues? And can the UK solve its skills shortage by retraining British workers?

What is net migration?

Farage said his aim was to achieve “zero net migration” — where the number of people arriving in Britain is the same as the number of people who go abroad.

This would reverse what has been happening over the past four decades or so. After the Second World War, there were more people leaving Britain than coming in — until the 1980s, when the trend reversed. Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, said: “We had some migration in the 1950s and ’60s after the war, but there were actually quite a lot of British people leaving.”

Net migration settled at about 200,000 to 300,000 annually — until the last three years, when, according to Sumption, it has been “unusually high”. For instance, in 2023, net migration was 685,000, which is double what might have been expected previously.

The spike was initially caused by a rise in arrivals from Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, and entry being offered to Hong Kong residents after a political crackdown in China. But Sumption said the latest immigration figures were driven by applications for work visas, particularly among those employed in the health and social care sectors.

What proportion of the UK workforce are immigrants?

It seems that Britain is not an outlier for immigration when compared with other countries. The proportion of foreign-born people in the overall population (about 14 per cent in 2019) is similar to that of other major economies, such as the US and Spain, but smaller than that of Austria (19 per cent) and Canada (21 per cent), according to the Migration Observatory.

Its data does show, however, that when measured as a proportion of the workforce, the impact of foreign-born workers has become more significant in the past two decades. Migration Observatory calculations show foreign-born workers make up 19 per cent of the workforce — double the 9 per cent in 2004.

According to Gregory Thwaites, research director at the Resolution Foundation think tank, “about 90 per cent of job growth in the last 20 years has been among people who weren’t born in the UK”.

To Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning and Work Institute (LWI), an independent research organisation, this disproves the “lump of labour” economic theory — “the idea that there is a fixed number of jobs in an economy, so if a migrant comes in and takes a job, that’s one less job for a Brit”.

As far as he is concerned, the problem of lack of training of British workers has lasted for centuries — and is separate to concerns about immigration. He pointed out that the first report on skills shortages in Britain was published in 1882.

Economists looking for links between the arrival of immigrant workers and a rise in domestic unemployment have found only small effects. The issue was a hot topic 20 years ago when the EU’s freedom of movement rules expanded to countries such as Poland. Researchers at the Centre for European Studies estimated that between 2004 and 2015, there was a rise in the unemployment rate of 0.27 per cent among British workers — but they concluded that this would “dissipate” after a “year or so” because of the UK’s flexible jobs market.

Which industries have a shortage of workers?

Job vacancies hit a record high of more than 1.3 million in the middle of 2022, and while that number came down to 898,000 in the three months to this April, it is still more than the 796,000 positions open before the pandemic lockdowns in March 2020.

The sectors with the most vacancies, according to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), are hospitality, social care and the motor industry. Until April, the government published a “shortage occupation list”, which is now called the “immigration salary list”. It includes 21 occupations as diverse as laboratory technicians, bricklayers, roofers, welders, care workers and musicians.

Why aren’t people taking these jobs?

While nearly 1.5 million people are unemployed — about 4.3 per cent of the working-age population — the main focus has been on trying to coax back into the workforce those who are classed as inactive: people who are not in work or seeking work.

Data this week will provide a new snapshot of the jobs market, but according to the ONS, much of the recent rise in economic inactivity is among younger people and those who are long-term sick — a post-pandemic phenomenon.

In theory, higher wages should make jobs more attractive, but that does always have the desired effect if the jobs are not in the right part of the country.

Raj Sehgal, who runs five care homes in Norfolk, reckons that his industry relies on overseas staff because domestic workers simply do not apply for the roles. He has even raised wages to higher than the national living wage of £11.44. “This whole idea that we need to do better to employ domestic staff is a myth. If we could, we would, and we’ve been trying for decades,” he said. “We cannot get the [domestic] staff to come in for love nor money.”

Another reason jobs are not filled is that people may not feel they have the correct skills.

What training is available?

Some businesses are determined to train their existing workforce. One is Brandauer, a specialist in metal pressing and stamping on the outskirts of Birmingham. Rowan Crozier, 49, the managing director, is looking for five staff to add to the company’s 64-strong team. “In terms of numbers, that perhaps doesn’t sound much, but when you think of it in terms of a percentage of our employed staff, it’s a reasonable amount,” he said.

For the first time, Crozier resorted to hiring two staff from India to fill the gaps left when EU workers returned home after Brexit. He is running a 20-week training course for toolmakers — a job vital to his business — “but I can’t always wait 20 weeks”.

Apprenticeships have been the traditional way to learn vocational skills, but this has become a contentious issue since the introduction of the apprenticeship levy — paid by big employers on 0.5 per cent of their wage bills — in 2017. Instead of boosting in-work training, the number of apprenticeships in England has fallen 36 per cent since the levy was introduced, and only one in two apprentices complete the training, according to a report from the LWI last week.

One idea put forward on the day before the election was called came from Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, who pledged to start “boot camps” in sectors with a lack of workers. This was adopted in the haulage industry after it was paralysed by driver shortages in 2021, when changes to visa rules following Brexit made it harder for EU workers to take up these roles. Some 5,710 individuals signed up for these boot camps in 2022-23.

But this scheme has also thrown up a new problem, according to industry lobby group Logistics UK: the people taking up the lorry driver training were the mechanics who fixed the lorries. Now there is a shortage of mechanics to keep the lorries on the road.

Rowan Crozier at the metal-pressing company Brandauer wants to train up his existing workforce

BRANDAUER

The implication of some of the policy ideas floated last week was that a plentiful supply of foreign workers might deter employers from training the existing workforce.

This was a point raised by the economist Gerard Lyons, who was an adviser to Liz Truss before her short-lived tenure as prime minister. “If you realise you don’t have unfettered access to the international labour market, it could force you to think about upskilling your domestic labour force,” said Lyons, who is chief economist at the wealth manager Netwealth.

But tackling the current worker shortages is only part of the problem. Britain also has to get ready for the jobs of the future, which may need to embrace artificial intelligence and green technology.

And crucially, according Matthew Percival, a director at employers body the CBI, Britain needs to think about the implications of an ageing population. “Skills alone will not be sufficient because we have a shortage of people,” he said.

By 2040, more people will be retiring than joining the workforce. That could signal a need for more migrant workers — or robots.

Additional reporting: Laith Al-Khalaf