UK Moves to Restrict Overseas Tech and Engineering Workers

­It seemed for a little while that things were finally looking up for the UK technology sector. While the Conservatives had pledged £1.3m investment in the area, Labour, who are generally the better party for investing in industry, had won a huge majority in the House of Commons, and it seemed that better things were coming. However, in around a week, that positivity has changed completely. Labour’s audit of the country’s finances discovered that the Conservative technology investment promise was unfunded, so it has been shelveed. After that the government announced that it is starting a probe into why so many engineers and technology workers are recruited from abroad, which will most likely lead to rules being introduced to make it harder to employ them in the future. 

The availability and experience of workers is one of the main factors that companies use when they decide locations for their businesses. Simply put, if a country has a large base of skilled engineers, then engineering companies will have a greater incentive to invest there. To do that, those companies want guarantees that their own engineers can freely enter the country and if they do struggle to recruit skilled people, they can recruit from a larger pool.

In the EU, workers can freely locate in any of the 28 member states, meaning that if it turned out that there was a shortage of skilled workers in one area, they could have been brought in without paperwork or cost from anywhere else in the economic area. Britain had been party to this agreement and was a popular choice of location for engineering companies, particularly from the US since there was no language barrier. However, since Brexit, the UK has left the free movement agreement and suffered through a loss of inward investment because of it. Now, the new probe will likely compound on that factor.

The country already had a major shortage of skilled workers before this announcement, particularly in engineering and technology, and if rules are implemented to make overseas recruitment more difficult, it could cause a negative feedback loop. A lack of engineers and difficulty bringing them here will make the country less attractive to engineering companies looking for a location, which means that there is less overall need for engineers, and so on.

At a time when out rivals in the EU, US, Japan, South Korea and more are vastly outspending the EU in tech funding, and the country is also falling behind in the AI boom, the country needs more engineers and technicians, not less. The government claims that companies here should do more to ensure the UK workforce is trained for these roles, but the best way to do that is to ensure that the country has a thriving technology sector, and that will need more investment and skilled personell, not less.