Comments made by the Home Secretary Theresa May at the Conservative Party Conference yesterday could deter much needed skilled workers from coming to the UK, according to a leading recruiter.

Andy Hogarth, chief executive of staffing and employability company Staffline Group, said that the tone of May’s speech, described by the chairman of the Institute of Directors (IoD) as “irresponsible rhetoric”, could deter some of the highly skilled people the country needs from coming here. 

“If you feel unwelcome you tend not to go,” said Hogarth, who agreed that they might choose to go to another country instead. 

During the speech at the Tory Party Conference in Manchester, May said: “The numbers coming from Europe are unsustainable and the rules have to change.” In addition, mass migration made it “impossible to build a cohesive society”.  

The speech attracted immediate criticism from business leaders. Simon Walker, chairman of the IoD, accused the home secretary of “putting party politics ahead of the country”, and “turning away the world’s best and brightest”. 

However, Steven Yendell, group managing director of international professional recruiter Phaidon International, played down the impact of the speech, telling Recruiter that despite what many regard as its unfriendly tone, it would not put people off coming to the UK.

“There is a skills shortage and the UK is massively attractive for people to come to. The UK has a strong economy that is out-performing our peers, and we are seen as leaders in finance, professional services and engineering. I don’t think her comments are going to put off people, in that part of the market, from coming here.”

However, Yendell was more critical of the government’s immigration policies, which include quotas on the number of skilled migrant workers on Tier-2 visas entering the country, and a policy of UK training and developing its own indigenous talent rather than relying on migrants from overseas. 

“We need to aim to be as self-sufficient as possible, but the reality is that the most highly-skilled parts of the labour market are highly global and talent is highly mobile,” said Yendell. “It is unrealistic to say we are ever going to be self-sufficient. We shouldn’t close our doors; we need a visa system to provide businesses with the labour they need to grow their businesses.”

Geoff Hyde, a director of Stanmore Steel in Sydenham, South London, said the home secretary’s speech was “good common sense attitude; it’s how you implement it that matters”.

Hyde agreed that the UK “could bring our skill set up”. However, until that happened, he said there was a strong case for continuing to allow many in-demand skilled workers, such as managers in the construction sector, in from outside the UK. 

He drew a distinction between such highly-skilled workers and low-skilled migrants. “The migrants who come in the trailers are not the right people for us,” he said. 

Hogarth said that the government’s policy of Britain training up more of its own people rather than relying on migrants was “absolutely the right thing to do in the medium to long term”. However, given that not enough people had yet been trained locally to take “the mostly high paid and more interesting jobs, we still need to recruit from overseas”, he said.

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