New Brexit immigration rules will hurt Scots businesses admits Gove
Michael Gove has said Scottish businesses relying on foreign labour could be harmed after Brexit by tough new immigration rules.
The UK environment secretar y yesterday criticised the £30,000 salar y threshold for immigrant workers, and said that it was not appropriate for all industries to assess workers’ skills based on salary level.
G i v i n g e v i d e n c e t o H o l y - rood’s Rural Economy Committee by video link, Mr Gove told MSPS he had asked Home Secretary Sajid Javid to “look f l e x i b l y i n h o w w e i n t e r - p r e t w h a t a s k i l l e d wo r k - e r i s ,” t o a v o i d v a c a n - cies in certain industries. “Pitching the level at which you define a skilled worker as someone earning over £30,000 a year wasn’t actually responsive to the particular needs - not just of the fish processing sector - but the food and drink sector overall,” he said.
“One of the points that I have made to the Home Secretar y and others is that we look flexibly at how we interpret what a skilled worker is in line with specific industries. I think that the soft fruit sector, which is so important in Angus and Ayrshire, does need to have access to all the labour it needs.”
H e s a i d t h e r e h a d b e e n “e nthusiastic uptake” o f a n p i l o t s c h e m e a l l o w i n g t h e r e c r u i t me n t o f u p t o 2 , 5 0 0 workers on six-month visas between the spring of 2019 and December 2020, particularly from Ukraine and Moldova, which are outwith the EU.