After two years, the post-Brexit points-based immigration system is having a detrimental impact on labour and skill shortages, with low-skilled migrants from the EU being the most severely impacted. In the concerned sectors, wage negotiations are still non-existent.
One of the main campaign pledges of the pro-Brexit group was to overhaul the UK’s immigration laws in order to reduce the influx of EU workers into the nation. The new points-based system will encourage firms to invest in the domestic UK workforce, rather than only depending on workers from abroad, former Home Secretary Priti Patel told the BBC in 2020, at a time when more people in the UK are looking for work. Preliminary data, however, indicates that this new immigration policy, which was first put in place days after an EU-UK agreement was reached in late December 2020, is having a significant negative impact on the severe labour shortages the nation has been experiencing ever since the Covid-19 pandemic began, particularly in low-skilled sectors. Read more-
