Despite the criticism, we are likely to need to recruit more EU migrants

Few people can have escaped the debate, prompted by the European elections on whether there should be tighter controls on other EU citizens coming to work in the UK. If tighter restrictions were imposed, what impact is it likely to have on the tourism workforce?

Just over a quarter of the tourism workforce were born outside of the UK, with 12% of these coming from other EU member states.

Recent figures show that nearly 11% of all EU migrants end up working in the sector. Kitchen assistants, retail assistants, chefs and waiting staff are all popular roles to end up working in, but nearly 13,000 EU migrants are working as restaurant and catering managers.

In real terms the percentage of EU migrants working in these positions is low – on average between one and three percent, with larger urban areas more likely to have a higher percentage than rural or coastal areas.

But with the sector needing to recruit an additional 660,000 staff by 2020, are we likely to recruit more EU migrants? Looking at the UK population, the fall in unemployment means that it is getting harder to target the unemployed. From our own experience having helped 3,500 unemployed people into work over the past two years, it is getting harder to ensure that clients get the quality candidates they are seeking as the people still looking for jobs need a lot of support and have generally been unemployed for a while. The labour market is obviously getting more competitive as the economy hots up, and in all likelihood the sector will once again find it more difficult to attract the calibre of people it’s seeking faced with stiff competition from other sectors.

So it is highly likely that we will need to recruit more EU migrants. This isn’t a new phenomenon and in some respects we are returning to the situation we faced before the economic downturn in 2008, although we are now more likely to be welcoming Spanish migrants (numbers increased by 262% between 2012 and 2013) than those from Eastern Europe. In the early 2000s the sector was highly dependent on recruiting workers from places like Poland and the Czech Republic to come and work in the sector, just like in the 1950s and 60s when it was waves of Irish and Italian immigrants filling key roles.

If tighter immigration was imposed from within the EU it could have significant implications for the sector. If you want to know what it might be like you don’t need to look too far, as the Asian and Oriental restaurant sector is finding it difficult to fill key posts on the back of the changes to UK immigration policy. Its true impact is yet to be felt, but it’s already hampering growth and some businesses have been forced to close.

The debate is not likely to go away and individual sector businesses will probably continue to come under fire for recruiting non-UK workers. However, the need to hire EU nationals will become increasingly urgent as employers find it difficult to recruit from the UK population.