Braverman: train up UK workers for shortage occupations

The home secretary Suella Braverman will call for UK businesses to train up British nationals in labour shortage areas in a bid to reduce immigration.

In a speech later today (15 May), she will argue that there is “no good reason” that employers cannot train their own lorry drivers and fruit pickers and that it is “not racist” to want to control borders.

The Conservative party has previously pledged to reduce net migration to below 100,000, but a think tank has predicted that numbers will reach 700,000 this year.

Braverman will speak at the National Conservatism conference in London, an event organised by a US-based campaign group.

“There is no good reason why we can’t train up enough HGV drivers, butchers or fruit pickers,” she will tell the conference.

Immigration rules have already been relaxed to some extent this year, with a number of roles added to the shortage occupation list to ease labour shortages in areas such as construction and hospitality.

The government also announced changes to the types of immigration routes workers can take into the UK following the Spring budget in March.

Efforts to boost the recruitment of more local workers into areas such as agriculture have not met with success so far. The Pick for Britain campaign, aimed at hiring UK-based seasonal staff for seasonal work on farms, was scrapped in 2021 after recruiting a limited number of workers.

In December, think tank the Social Market Foundation said that high immigration levels would become “the norm” in decades to come as the UK deals with an ageing workforce and skills shortages continue to bite.

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The net migration figure for 2022 will be published next week and is estimated to be around 700,000 by the Centre for Policy Studies. Some of this has been driven by the Ukraine resettlement scheme, which accelerated pathways to the UK for Ukrainian refugees affected by war.

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