In Musselburgh, the East Lothian town where green hydrogen supplier Logan Energy is based, there is a shortage of Mandarin-speaking mechanical and electrical engineers.
Even after waiving the language requirement and offering flexible working, the Scottish company is struggling to find the mix of engineering and software skills it needs to support rapid expansion into new markets.
According to chief executive Thomas Burley, the average recruitment time is six months, but after an 18-month search, the only way to fill a crucial position was to sponsor a visa for an EU-based candidate.
“It’s difficult for a small company like ours to hire before we get projects,” he said. “We need to be able to access very specific talent… We can get good quality people in the UK, but when you need to expand fairly quickly it’s difficult.”
Burley’s difficulties are at the heart of a question recently raised by the new Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, who wants to know why UK Employers Companies that offer well-paid professional positions seem to be mired in a permanent skills crisis.
On Wednesday, he wrote to the government’s independent immigration advisers. Asking them to investigate Why the technology and engineering sectors were so dependent on international recruitment.
“The current situation is not sustainable and the system as it exists does not work in the national interest,” Cooper said.
The underlying message was clear: if employers want to maintain easy access to the visa system in the future, they will have to demonstrate that they have done everything possible to train local talent.
The big difference from previous restrictive measures on visa routes, however, is that ministers are focusing on two groups of high-earning graduate jobs where migrants were previously seen as more likely to boost UK productivity, innovation and tax revenues than undermine British workers.
Brian Bell, chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee charged with the review, said the new Labour government’s approach was in line with a broader push to encourage the private sector to invest more in training.
“You can’t just say that because these are well-paid jobs we don’t need to train British people. These are exactly the jobs we want to train British people for,” he told the Financial Times, describing ministers’ thinking.
Reducing the number of engineers and IT workers entering the UK would make relatively little difference to net migration, which is already falling from an all-time high of 745,000 recorded in 2022.
Outside of health care, employers sponsored 67,703 skilled worker visas in total in the year to March. Just over 4,000 of these were in the engineering sector. In the information technology sector, where hiring has been depressed by a sectoral downturn, employers sponsored around 10,000 skilled worker visas.
Just under 4,000 workers also entered through a separate “business mobility” visa route, which is often used by IT outsourcing companies such as India’s Infosys to bring employees to the UK on temporary secondment.
Companies say it would be impossible in the short term to replace these hires with UK graduates, who often leave engineering to pursue higher-paid careers in finance or consulting.
They also say restricting visas would not solve a skills crisis rooted in a lack of funding for higher and continuing education.
“The number of people studying STEM in the UK is too low for the demand we have,” said Andy Heyes, regional director of specialist technology recruitment firm Harvey Nash.
Jamie Cater, senior policy manager at manufacturers’ organisation Make UK, said employers were “in a catch-22 situation” because colleges could not afford qualified tutors to teach apprenticeships, and companies were too short of staff to hire employees to fill the gaps.
Meanwhile, universities rely on higher fees paid by international students to fund technical courses that are expensive to deliver.
Despite their opposition to the idea of visa restrictions, business groups hope the MAC review will lead the government to increase support for training in areas where international recruitment is prevalent.
“The UK system is all stick and no carrot,” said Cater, who wants greater use of the visa system to lead to more government funding for apprenticeships in the occupations in question.
Bell said the government had not made “any judgement… about what the response might be” and that the MAC could still conclude that it was “inevitable that immigration will play a significant role” in certain occupations.
“We are free to say that a major problem is the lack of training places… we will feel free to go into that area,” he added. If the MAC were to find that universities were not offering places to British students because they paid lower fees, “these are trade-offs that the government will have to make.”
But Bell also noted that there would always be some jobs where companies competing globally would want to hire the best person from a global group.
Heyes also said that tightening visa rules too much could backfire in the highly mobile tech sector, where multinationals could easily move work overseas.
“If we cut [access to overseas workers]“Organisations will find another way to get them,” he said. “The difference is that that person might not be paying tax in the UK.”