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According to a report published by Cambridge News, UK cities are facing a talent shortage pandemic. In Cambridge, vacancies for scientists, nurses and healthcare workers have gone unfilled for months, potentially paving the way for highly-skilled foreign workers to come to the UK on Tier 2 visas. However, the employer needs a Tier 2 Sponsorship licence to employ tier 2 visa workers. The whole process of employing an overseas worker on a tier 2 visa can be quite difficult.
Research carried out by job site, Adzuna, reports that demand for workers to fill vacancies across the scientific and healthcare sectors in Cambridge is huge. According to its report, Adzuna found that one-fifth of science jobs and one in 10 healthcare and nursing vacancies went unfilled, despite being advertised for 90 days.
Cities struggle with skills shortages
It has been reported that the struggle to find skilled workers has hit some of Britain’s biggest cities hard, including London, Cambridge and Brighton in the south, while the pandemic has also spread to the North East to Middlesbrough and Sunderland. Recruiters are finding graduate and part-time positions particularly hard to fill.
Co-founder of Adzuna, Doug Monro, said: “Some areas of the jobs market have clearly fallen victim to a talent shortage, which has only been worsened by Brexit uncertainty.”
With vacancies remaining unfilled for three months or more it’s a nightmare for employers as the job they so desperately need to get done, isn’t getting done. Monro said: “The situation seriously dampens prospects for our STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) hubs like Cambridge.”
Mr Munro has urged businesses to focus on up-skilling British talent to plug gaps across shortage sectors. Reassuring foreign talent, likely to be in the UK on a Tier 2 visa for highly-skilled overseas nationals, will further enhance their long-term prospects while releasing some of the pressure on those sectors struggling with talent acquisition.
However, if certain UK industry sectors are finding it hard to recruit from the domestic labour pool, hiring from outside Europe is growing increasingly difficult. In particular, the cost to recruit Tier 2 visa holders has shifted significantly since changes were made to the program in April 2017.
The introduction of an annual £1,000 immigration skills charge (£364 per year for smaller businesses), per foreign worker hired and a salary threshold increase from £25,000 to £30,000, means a number of UK companies can barely afford to cover the cost of recruiting foreign talent.
However, there are exemptions for PhD-level occupations, Intra-company Transfer Graduate Trainees and those switching from Tier 4 to Tier 2 in the UK. The government introduced the charge in a bid to reduce immigrant numbers.
Meanwhile the fees raised as result of the charge will be used to address skills gaps in the workforce. The immigration skills charge is payable at the time of allocating a Tier 2 Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS) and is payable in advance for the total period of time covered by the CoS.
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