Conference News Supplements London Supplement | Page 3

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London
Labour matters
Mark Field FIH, operations director,
Victory Services Club, on how the hospitality sector’s
staffing issues will be impacted post-Brexit
ccording to the British
Hospitality
Association’s 2017
Labour Migration
Report, Brexit will cause a shortage
of at least 60,000 hospitality
workers per year, meaning it will
become more and more difficult to
hire and retain employees.
Like many London hospitality
businesses a significant percentage
of our staff is from overseas. It’s a
very uncertain time for both
employers and employees as we all
wait to see how Brexit unfolds and
how it will impact on a European
citizen’s ability to stay and work in
the UK.
In this period of uncertainty, our
main priority has been to keep the
staff that we have. We are reassuring
them that they are valued; that we
employed them because they are
good at what they do and that hasn’t
changed. We are in this together
because our business wouldn’t
function without them and that we
will move heaven and earth to
ensure that they can stay
working for us post Brexit.
Once we know the deal, we
can manage the process and
move on. The process may
involve an application fee,
and we have told our team
that we should be able to
foot the bill for them, but
until we know if the cost
is in the tens or the
“In this period
of uncertainty, our
main priority has
been to keep the
staff that we have”
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hundreds of pounds it’s impossible
to make a full commitment.
Post Brexit the pipeline of new staff
will change, but it’s worth
remembering that this pipeline has
changed before. At the moment lots
of hospitality staff are from eastern
Europe, but before Poland joined the
EU many were from western Europe
and the Commonwealth, and
looking back even further, it was
the Caribbean. A new pipeline will
emerge, but we do not yet know
what it will look like or how abundant
it will be.
The hospitality industry is resilient
and accustomed to having high staff
turnover in certain areas, but that’s
because we encourage career
progression; it’s very common for
someone to start as a chamber maid
or a kitchen porter and to quickly
work up the ranks. The biggest risk
to our industry would be if a
high salary becomes a
condition of a working
visa; the required
salary could be
prohibitive for entry
level positions and so
this tried and tested
way of joining the
industry and developing
talent would be
abolished.
It’s an uncertain time,
but one thing we can all
be sure of is that good
staff are valuable to us
and valuable to London.