Crisis boiling as restauranteurs fail to recruit staff

Buddy Love who runs the Flying Fish near Ilminster with his wife Kate, said he'd had to restrict the amount of bookings he could take

Food venues have warned they are failing to recruit sufficient staff to deal with the post-pandemic demand.

Despite spending more than £1,500 on job ads, Buddy Love, who runs the Flying Fish in Somerset said he had been forced to restrict bookings after struggling to hire a new chef.

Mr Love said the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit were partly to blame.

A Home Office spokesperson said leaving the EU had enabled the UK to introduce a new points-based immigration system.

It said the scheme was designed to encourage employers to make long term investments in the UK's domestic workforce instead of relying on labour from abroad.

Pandemic effect

According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 164,000 hospitality vacancies between January and March 2022.

Mr Love, who runs the hotel, pub and restaurant near Ilminster with his wife Kate, had previously employed chefs from Romania, but said they had left because of Brexit.

Mr Love also said tighter restrictions on hospitality businesses during the pandemic had meant "people don't see it as a safe industry anymore".

Restricting bookings, Mr Love said he was desperate for staff and had even offered incentives for people to work for him - including free accommodation, travel expenses and paid utilities.

He said so far the strategy had been unsuccessful, with one person he had hired not turning up for work despite buying them a train ticket, booking them a taxi and helping them to relocate.

Running the kitchen on his own seven days a week for breakfast, lunch and dinner, he said he had been advertising for a chef for the past three months and it was affecting him financially.

'Worse by the day'

"Last weekend I had 27 people booked for dinner.

"If I had another person, I could have done double that but I had to stop taking bookings," he said.

Mr Love said one solution would be to relax the visa system, making it "easier for European workers to get back into the UK hospitality industry and get it going again".

President of the Hospitality Professionals Association, Harry Murray, who lives near Box, told BBC Radio Wiltshire, it was sad that not enough young people were choosing to go into the industry especially at a time when restaurants and hotels were running at high occupancy.

Chris Trimnell, who works for a hospitality recruitment agency, said there was a chronic shortage of staff in all areas of the industry

He said he did not think the shortage was solely down to pay, but thought young people were looking for "more flexible rotas" and might be put off because of the pressures of working in hospitality.

Chris Trimnell, from Catering Services International, a hospitality recruitment firm based in Swindon, said they had seen a chronic shortage of qualified staff in all areas of the industry - including education, industrial, healthcare and traditional settings.

"It's getting worse by the day," he said.

Mr Trimnell added: "It's harder work than it used to be.

"Everywhere is short staffed so new workers joining the industry are getting a taste of it and sometimes it's more than they can handle."