CBI president: UK must bring in more immigrants to deal with shortages
The president of one of the UK’s largest business groups has called for the government to increase immigration in the short-term to deal with key worker shortages.
Lord Karan Bilimoria, president of the Confederation of Business Industry (CBI), today told City PM that there should also be a government board that sets immigration targets to plug shortages of lorry drivers and poultry workers.
There is an estimated 100,000-person shortfall in lorry drivers, which has contributed to shortages of fuel and supermarket goods.
The government is issuing 5,000 short-term visas for lorry drivers and 5,000 for poultry workers in a bid to ease shortages, however Labour and some business groups have called for Boris Johnson to go further.
Bilimoria, a crossbench peer and founder of of the beer Cobra, said during day-two of the Conservative party conference that the government must issue as many visas “as the economy needs”.
“The way that you have an independent commission or monetary policy committee that meets every month there should perhaps be, whether it’s an immigration advisory committee, or a body that looks at the labour needs of the economy and says you need so many more thousand in this sector r this sector for a year,” he said.
“Something like that could be there on an going basis, it’s not just Brexit. This is the needs of the economy at any one time and shortages can be caused by all sorts of outside economic factors.”
The Petrol Retailers Association (PRA) chair Brian Madderson warned this week that petrol shortages are still a “really big problem” in London and the South East even if they have abated in other parts of the country.
There are currently shortages in some food products like chicken, with pictures of empty supermarkets shelves splattered across newspaper frontpages over the past week.
Boris Johnson admitted to the BBC on Sunday that the shortages could last until Christmas, but that he would not “pull the lever” of more immigration.
“We can’t go back to the tired old model called uncontrolled immigration and get people in at low wages, and there will be a period of adjustment, but that’s what we need to see in this country,” he said.
The government this week deployed 200 military tanker personnel, including 100 drivers, to deliver fuel to forecourts across the country.
It goes alongside a package of measures to try and get more lorries back on the roads, including recruiting former lorry drivers and streamlining the HGV licence test process.