Last weekend Stagecoach cancelled over 200 buses that significantly impacted on the park and rides around the city. The same happened on Monday November 1st, Stagecoach largely cited shortages of drivers. The West Coast rail line and those in the North have also suffered cancellations on a grand scale, lack of drivers is also given as one of the reasons. We currently have almost as many vacancies in the economy as there are those unemployed.
If you wish to eat out in Cambridge you will find very few quality restaurants open for lunch and dinner everyday, some are only open for a few nights a week and once again staff shortages are a prime reason. Consumer demand remains strong, footfall increased last week in Cambridge by 10% over the previous week and against 2019 pre covid was 6% higher. So businesses are effectively having to turn business away because the economy at large is short of workers.
One could go on, describing many other sectors such as construction, the care sector, the NHS all are short staffed, it is a hugely complex situation, an ageing population, the great resignation, the pandemic and Brexit are all contributing factors. Programmes are in place to seek to ‘grow our own’ skills in these sectors, but this will and is taking time whilst large portions of the economy have higher wages, due to the need to attract and retain staff but falling productivity due high staff turnover and with so many staff in training.
The Government needs to look beyond a key 2019 election pledge and let more workers into the country to staff these essential sectors, this would be a common-sense pragmatic approach to a real world problem we have today. As the retail hospitality, accommodation, distribution and warehousing sectors look to hire tens of thousands of seasonal workers for this Christmas I wish them luck but fear vacancies will go unfilled, customers will not be able to get the goods and services they want and businesses, still recovering from recent economic shocks will miss out on spend at this vital time.
