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Lord Rooker, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, recently announced new categories of work permits to support industries with severe recruitment difficulties.
Following this announcement, the Home Office referred to research published between early 2000 and the beginning of 2001 when it was asked where the Government saw such 'difficulties' as lying in the IT sector. The documents the Department referred to included the following information:
'The IT industry is expected to need to recruit another 500,000 people over the next 10 years. Work permit applications have been increasing at the rate of 10-15 per cent a year.
'Results from an employer-based survey (covering 27,000 employers) undertaken by the National Skills Task Force between August and November 1999 show that there were over 500,000 unfilled vacancies at any one point in time during this period (excluding very small businesses)- well over twice the number of vacancies reported to the Employment Service. Almost half of these vacancies were described by employers as 'hard to fill'.'
'According to the Task Force, one in four firms looking for staff are unable to fill vacancies because they can't find people with the right skills. Chris Humphries, Chair of the National Skills Task Force and Director General of the British Chamber of Commerce was reported as saying: "Skill shortages are impacting heavily on firms' abilities to compete, and act as a drain on business productivity."'
Douglas Alexander, Minister for e-commerce, has been driving forward the Government's pledge to supply foreign IT skills to the UK.
Mr Alexander recently announced an extension to Indian IT workers' visas when working in the UK during a trip to Bangalore. He also recently opened the first 'e-Europe conference' to share UK expertise in IT with Eastern European countries.
A spokesman for the Office of the e-Envoy said: "The general idea of the e-Europe initiative at this point is to help drive forward Eastern European IT in participating countries and to help them develop their own knowledge bases. As regards workers coming to the UK, I think we would expect cross-fertilisation to result from the wider initiative."
Piran Littleton, Business Development Manager at Fleet-based IT recruitment agency Alexander Francis, said: "Contractors are practically fighting for projects at the moment, there are only a handful of clients actively taking contractors on, but for the work we have available, competition is fierce.
"The Government should be spending more time looking to support the skills base in the UK. If it becomes purely about the price of hiring the worker then the point about quality begins to become lost. I think we already have a very high quality and adequate number of skilled IT contractors in the UK."
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Richard Powell, Shout99
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