‘UK must solve labour shortage’

THE chief executive of retailer Next has said the current UK immigration policy is crippling economic growth as he urged the government to let more foreign workers into Britain.

Brexit-backer Lord Wolfson (above) said the country needed a “different approach” to migration to address the acute labour shortage, adding “this is not the Brexit I wanted”.

“We have got people queueing up to come to this country to pick crops that are rotting in fields, to work in warehouses that otherwise wouldn’t be operable, and we’re not letting them in,” Wolfson was quoted as saying by the BBC.

“In respect of immigration, it’s definitely not the Brexit that I wanted, or indeed, what many of the people who voted Brexit wanted,” he added.

He suggested firms pay a tax to employ foreign workers to encourage companies to recruit from the UK first.

“Businesses who need foreign workers should be able to pay a tax of 10 per cent to the government on foreign workers’ salaries to ensure that only the businesses that really couldn’t find UK workers would recruit overseas,” he said.

The government, the Next boss argued, needed to decide whether the UK was an open, free-trading country or whether it wanted to become ‘fortress Britain’ after Brexit, closing the gate to foreign labour at the cost of the economy.

He suggested a market-based solution to fix current labour shortages, which have affected sectors including healthcare, hospitality and logistics.

Net migration to the UK was estimated to be about 239,000 in the year ending June 2021, a slight fall from the previous year’s figure of 260,000. Last month, a survey by the CBI business lobby group found nearly three-quarters of UK firms had suffered from labour shortages in the past 12 months.