Businesses are urging politicians to relax the UK’s stance on immigration due to an almost record number of job vacancies.
At a conference in Birmingham on Monday, Confederation of British Industry (CBI) head Tony Danker will call for “economic migration” for areas facing a shortage of workers, as well as playing down the existing short-term plans to fill vacant jobs.
Danker will say: "We don't have enough Brits to go round for the vacancies that exist, and there's a skills mismatch in any case,” adding that “believing automation can step in to do the job in most cases is unrealistic”.
CBI also raised its concern over ill health within the economy, suggesting absence caused by sickness costs the UK £180bn a year, something Danker said won’t improve anytime soon.
Many senior politicians are due to attend the event with job vacancies at roughly 1.25mln at the end of September.
Danker, the CBI's director-general, joins a growing list of business people calling for changes to Brexit rules, particularly a relaxation of the UK’s immigration laws which ultimately made it more difficult for businesses to recruit foreign workers.
Next PLC (LSE:NXT) chief executive, Simon Wolfson said: “We have got people queueing up to come to this country to pick crops that are rotting in fields, to work in warehouses that otherwise wouldn’t be operable, and we’re not letting them in.”
He added: “In respect of immigration, it’s definitely not the Brexit that I wanted, or indeed, many of people who voted Brexit wanted.”
Private equity billionaire Guy Hands also suggested the UK would need a bailout by the International Monetary Fund if Brexit was not renegotiated.
He forecast “steadily increasing taxes, steadily reducing benefits and social services, higher interest rates and eventually the need for a bailout from the IMF,” would lead to the UK becoming the “sick man of Europe”.
Meanwhile, chancellor Jeremy Hunt recently outlined his desire to reduce UK dependency on foreign workers, despite suggesting they were vital to future economic growth.
Office for National Statistics Figures placed net migration to the UK at nearly 240,000 in the year to June 2021.