The government’s plan to impose an immigration cap on non European Union migrants is again causing concern amongst professional recruiters.
The Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee published a report last week claiming the cap would cut net annual arrivals by less than 1%. The report also highlights concerns that commerce, education and science could all be damaged echoing recent feedback from specialised recruiters. An illogical area of current immigration policy, highlighted by the Committee, is the clause that allows professional sports people to be exempt from the cap while international scientists are not.
Director of Policy and Professional Services at the REC, Tom Hadley, commented that immigration is a highly sensitive issue and although we acknowledge that there must be a degree of control, the government needs to reach a happy medium between reducing the number of migrants and still securing our economic recovery.
The financial services, healthcare, pharmaceutical and science sectors have all expressed concern at the resourcing implications of the cap.
There is an urgent need to upskill UK workers and provide better guidance on opportunities in high demand sectors. However, we are already experiencing skills shortages and this problem will not be rectified overnight. Immigration policy has to take this into consideration and evolve with the needs of the labour market.
The coalition has promised to reduce net migration from last year’s figure of 196,000 to just “tens of thousands” within the next five years. The UK government has no direct control over European Union immigration but data from last year shows that only 17% of immigrants who arrived in the UK came from outside the EU on Tier 1 or Tier 2 visas.
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