Higher pay isn’t enough for work-shy Britain

The hospitality sector faces collapse, in part due to our cultural aversion to working unsocial hours

After years of trying to make a go of it, an acquaintance of mine recently threw in the towel and closed his restaurant for good. “First there were the enforced closures of lockdown,” he says. “Then it was fast-rising input prices such as energy and foodstuffs. But the final straw is that we simply cannot get the staff, even with 20 per cent pay rises.”

That pattern is being repeated across the land; according to the food and drink research consultancy CGA, nearly 1,000 licenced premises have closed since July, when social distancing restrictions were fully lifted. Staff shortages and rising costs are cited as the main reasons.

Some will blame Brexit, but there is a much more worrying problem at work here – whisper it, for fear of causing offence, but we have a culturally work-shy labour force that has grown used to migrants filling the jobs that indigenous Brits don’t want to do.

According to the latest labour market data, the UK enjoys record numbers of staff vacancies, resulting in plenty of competition for workers, and in many cases steep increases in wages. This is obviously good news, and lends at least a degree of support to Boris Johnson’s claim that his policies are already sowing the seeds for a higher wage, higher skilled economy.

But let’s not celebrate too soon. If we look at the underlying reasons for these shortages, they have as much to do with natives absenting themselves from the workforce as the deterrent effect of Britain’s new immigration policies.

By some estimates, the potential workforce – that is people of working age either in employment or seeking it – has shrunk by nearly a million on pre-pandemic levels.

Part of the explanation is that a lot more young people are choosing higher education, and in the jargon have become “economically inactive”. Lockdown effectively closed the jobs market for a while, making university an obvious alternative. Suspension of the normal examinations system also enabled many more to qualify.

The pandemic, meanwhile, encouraged some older workers to retire early. And yes, many Continental workers have gone home never to return.

But the biggest factor is a steep fall in the number of self-employed workers. With the pandemic – and government income support – largely over, and demand back at pre-covid levels, maybe they will now return.

Whether they have got the skills, or live in the right parts of the country, for the abundant jobs now on offer is obviously an issue. But at least in numerical terms, there should in theory be no shortage of workers.

For hospitality, however, it won’t necessarily solve the problem. I’m going to get myself into a lot of trouble for saying this, but Brits do not on the whole like working unsocial hours, including evenings and weekends. Even with big increases in wages, it is therefore proving hard to get the locals to fill the positions.

This cultural aversion to anything outside normal working hours is almost unique to Britain, as is the often accompanying snobbery around working in service, care and other supposedly low skilled forms of employment. You don’t see it in France, Italy or Spain, and you certainly don’t see it in the United States.

The market will eventually prevail, and some kind of new equilibrium will establish itself. Wages will rise to a level where people do find it acceptable to work as a matter of course from 5pm to midnight and at weekends.

But it will also mean a substantial rise in costs, pricing many mid-market eateries and pubs out of business. The sector will instead polarise between high-end establishments whose customers are not price conscious, and heavily automated self-service chains such as Mcdonald’s. One industry insider predicts that unless the Government changes its mind, and allows a lot more short-term visas for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, the industry will shrink by about a third over the next several years.

If that seems an exaggeration, just consider the following.

The explosive growth we have seen in away-from-home eating and drinking in the past 20 years coincides almost exactly with the advent of mass free movement, and has indeed been substantially driven by the apparently inexhaustible pool of relatively cheap and willing workers it provides. The other half of the globalisation story is the outsourcing of production to low labour cost markets such as China.

In defence of the consequent high levels of immigration and global trade, it means that we no longer have to do the menial, unsocial jobs of our forebears. Others do them for us. But cheap goods and nights out come at their own price – a lost sense of belonging, tradition and community.

In reversing these trends, we will just have to get used to higher prices, less choice, and for many of us, doing the sort of jobs we have been turning our noses up at. Maybe that’s what people want, I don’t know, but it’s a big change that requires the sort of careful and sustained management that has not been much in evidence these past few years.