Labour shortage hits rural tourism
AFTER two pandemic-hit years when takings dropped by at least 45 per cent you might have thought this was going to be the summer of recovery for the South West’s tourism season.
Well, think again. Because a combination of factors has conspired to create something approaching a perfect storm across the hospitality sector.
There were already reports when businesses were trying to rescue the remnants of last year’s lockdownbattered season that they were facing difficulties recruiting sufficient staff.
But any hopes they may have entertained that this would be a short-term problem and things would put themselves right in time for the summer of ’22 have been well and truly scuppered. If anything the situation has merely worsened. And, equally, spread well beyond the coastal hotspots of Devon and Cornwall.
Tourism operators on Exmoor, for example, now find themselves in the bizarre situation of facing an upcoming rush of repeat business from those punters who discovered the area’s delights when they were deprived of their trips to the sunshine belt and want to come back but of being unable to take full advantage of the trade because they can’t hire enough bodies to fill the rotas.
The upshot is that even some of the best-known and most popular venues on the moor are going to have to put up the “closed” signs at least part of the week and turn business away: a particularly painful step to have to take in an area where 60 per cent of all jobs are dependent on the visitor trade and where tourism, with its annual £431 million contribution, accounts for more than half the value of the local economy.
The causes of this situation are complex, inter-related and not likely to be corrected any time soon.
During the two lockdowns many furloughed workers discovered there were other and better-remunerated jobs to be found in other sectors, not that surprising really since the hospitality industry has traditionally set a low benchmark for wages.
At the same time thousands of EU workers who were previously staffing hotels, restaurants and pubs felt themselves no longer welcome here post-Brexit and hoofed it back home.
Now from the parallel universe he inhabits Jacob Rees-Mogg would probably apply his distorting lens to the situation and announce it was a post-Brexit triumph for the Government and the UK because their departure would open up thousands of job opportunities for British workers.
Except the British workers have failed to materialise because they have all found easier, better-paid jobs elsewhere. And there are two further complicating factors.
The first concerns accommodation. Live-in jobs are few and far between. But second-home owners have snapped up so many houses and fuelled a red-hot housing market to the point where young people of working age cannot afford to buy anything on the moor and unless they are still living with their parents have to move away.
Which means if they have a job in a tourism business on Exmoor they have to commute. Expensively. And no-one needs reminding of what has happened of late to fuel prices. Which means that in many instances those young people can no longer afford to drive onto the moor to work because once they have paid their weekly petrol bill their wage packets won’t contain enough change to live on.
So dire has the situation become that a forum of local employers is now being set up to look at a multiplicity of issues, from how to match college training to the needs of the local labour market, how to prevent a further drift away from the countryside into towns and cities and how to formulate and apply more attractive wage levels.
But the route to correcting all the deficiencies is likely to be long and arduous. reflecting profits foregone.
There is a hint of this in the current debate raging over the nutrient pollutions of watercourses linked to excessive discharges from sewage works.
Housebuilders are up in arms over an embargo that has been placed on dozens of local authorities requiring them to ensure all new homes are “nutrient-neutral” – and in the process putting schemes involving 120,000 new-builds on ice until such time as the requirement is met.
This is in direct conflict with government’s own five-year housing targets which local authorities are legally buond to achieve.
In the midst of all this, developers are pleading for our sympathy, waving shrouds and pointing out that the extra cost of building non-polluting new houses is going to add five grand to the cost of each.
No-one should be shedding as much as a single tear for them. Housebuilders have never shied away from upping the price of a new house by five grand or so and if you look at the bloated profits the sector declares every year it will be abundantly clear that there is plenty of leeway to absorb some, if not all of the additional cost burden.
But once again farming is being blamed somewhat blithely for adding to the problem. In particular, the house-building lobby has been waving around a report based, apparently, on a study carried out in Somerset showing that the “urban environment” accounts for just four per cent of nutrient pollution (through run-off from roads, car parks, industrial estates) with the majority ostensibly caused by “farming
and sewage discharges”.
Well, there’s the flaw in the defence: the trail from sewage discharges leads right back to domestic properties, hundreds of thousands of which have been added to the nation’s housing stock without the water companies carrying out any upgrades to capacity at sewage treatment plants because they have been too occupied with shovelling dividends into shareholders’ wallets.
Now the scale of the damage they have caused (as well as the 25,000 illegal sewage discharges into bathing waters last year) has become clear they are being brought to heel by the Government, told the party is over and forced to carry out improvements.
But it’s all going to take time and the question has to be asked why Defra and its several agencies have sat on their hands and allowed this situation to develop into a crisis which is now threatening the internationally protected status of some wildlife sites.
As to farming consistently being vilified by environmentalists I have seen a pie chart which reveals it only accounts for a small proportion of the problem with sewage discharges by far and away the dominant cause.
Only once the water industry has cleaned up its act – supposing it can, or will – will farming be the single largest source of water pollution. And since a major initiative is already in progress to reduce the damage done by run-off from farmland I would put good money on farming being able to demonstrate that it has cleaned up its act long before the housing sector can make a similar claim.