Staff shortages are now a national crisis

[Confusedofbritain]

Staff shortages across many sectors is now a national crisis surely? I’ve given up expecting anything of this government, but why isn’t Labour beating them with a stick over this?

Some examples which affect me personally….

• Can’t go on holiday due to cancelled flight, cause by lack of ground staff.
• I work for NHS trust and we have closed a ward due to c 50% vacancies. We have plenty of money but can’t spend it. Now competing with other trusts paying increasingly high golden handshakes.
• Tried to book restaurant for Tuesday birthday. Not possible as all places shut Monday and Tuesday due to short staff (esp chefs).
• Poor service when we do go out. Staff look frazzled.
• Can’t get a builder to do an extension. Often not bothering to quote. Builder friend can’t keep labourers and brickies. Paying increasingly high wages but getting poached.
• Window fitter quoted me 2x higher than 2019 (for a much smaller window!) probably because they’re so busy and can’t increase capacity due to lack of staff. So prices have gone up by 100%.
• Long delay in discharge for father from hospital, due to long waits for care package (caused by staff shortages). He was in hospital a lot longer than necessary and declined hugely as result.

It’s largely caused by Brexit, partly people retiring or changing livelihood during Covid…:.but why wasn’t this anticipated and what are we doing about it?

I want to see posters EVERYWHERE encouraging people to consider NHS careers. It’s a rewarding career, but impossible to cope and keep going with so few staff. We are escalating to NHS England constantly, saying we need a national solution. It’s beyond critical, but I’m not confident that there is a national drive to sort this out.

The economic and social consequences of ignoring this massive structural issue will be disastrous!

So yes, I do know you need to brush up on your knowledge.

Since I too am talking from direct family experience, I can only comment that obviously people had different experiences. Perhaps you could admit that? Perhaps your knowledge has been broadened?

I didn't say that there were nurseries on every corner. As another poster has said nurseries were provided for munitions workers. The people I knew who were involved are now deceased but they might have thought that as munitions workers, or one in a steel works, that all parents were provided for in the same way?

The point being that provision can be made if the will is there. Some employers are most definitely reaping what they have sown.

Fair enough. But you imply it can be easily done - it really can’t. There isn’t the trained staff or safe spaces within working environments to do it. Boris offering to allow staff to care for yet more children per member of staff isn’t going to help or make things safer. The very few places than can provide in-house nurseries, have spaces that are fought over. I can’t even think of single workplace that has an on-site nursery except for the local college/university. Plus today, would people want their children somewhere that was so dangerous even if the care could be provided. - ship yards, garages etc?

I do wonder if this staffing crisis is being used by some employers as an excuse to not recruit and wring their hands, bleating that there's a crisis and what can they do, to excuse delivering a poor service, and meanwhile they're pocketing the difference in what they should be paying for their wage bill and what they actually are. While the staff and customers/users of the service suffer the concequences.

Sure, they're advertising and they're interviewing but people are not applying, turning the jobs down, not qualified enough (and no training offered) or not lasting, and instead of looking at the reasons why, and addressing them, they're stubbornly sticking to the pay and conditions they already offer and blaming anyone and anything else for the lack of recruitment - it's because people are lazy, it's because people would rather live on benefits, it's because people won't get themselves ahead, it's because people aren't committed, it's because of Brexit, it's because of covid yada yada yada.
They're not willing to invest in their own business or industry, would rather make higher profits. And the results are being seen now. And it's been a problem in hospitality and social care for years, the difference between the two though is that tax payers fund social care, twice. Once with the actual cost of the care and then again for the wage top ups of those doing the actual work. And we then as a society celebrate the middle man - the care providers- making all the money in the middle, we think that they're something to be aspired to, what 'hard work' can achieve - and fail to recognise it's the hard work of other people and them being allowed to exploit that, that actually got them where they are.

In the charity I work for we can't seem to recruit many volunteers. I'm guessing it's because they are finding it easier to find paid work so don't need to rely on voluntary work experience if they have been out of the workforce for a while. We are trying to set up a new service but can't without some volunteers to staff it !

NHS need to sort out their recruitment process. I was offered a few NHS roles earlier this year but ended up not taking them as the recruitment process was taking months. I have spoken to a few others in the same position. I guess maybe HR are short staffed!

TRAC is rubbish. A month after interviewing for one post it hadn't updated that I hadn't been successful. I found out when I saw the same post re-advertised. Bloody awful and hurtful, especially to someone who has given 35 years service to the NHS. Will never work for the NHS again.

Problem is everywhere is short staffed and the staff left to deal with that end up leaving due to stress and poor working conditions, which then puts people off for applying as the job then gets a bad rep.
Vicious cycle

Also someone mentioned teachers. It's more a retention crisis, not a recruitment crisis.
Just a high turnover of young, enthusiastic staff who then get a few years in and realise what a catastrophic mistake they've made training to be a teacher.
Older, more experienced teachers are a bit of a rarity nowadays, particularly full time staff.

Schools don't want part time experienced staff. Too expensive and not as easy to lump more work onto.

Sadly the nhs has stolen almost all the cash desperately needed for elderly and disabled social care. Resulting in social care staffing crisis, rock bottom wages despite many staff working at nhs band 4 level, underfunded measly care packages which effect best practice and delivery of person centred care.

Spot on.

More and better childcare perhaps so more women can go back to work and fill the gaps in the work force?

Even with the money to pay it's hard to organise around school hours, inset days and holidays.

But you imply it can be easily done - it really can’t

I was not aware of implying it could be done easily, but things can be done when the political will is there. But it usually requires some sort of Governmental input either national or local, and we have a Government that wants to have as small a state as possible. So they rely on market forces and private industry, and we have the mess we are currently getting ourselves into because there is no oversight or direction.

Oh wow, so much ignorance in one comment.
'You obviously know*(fixed that for you) nothing about Poland and the healthcare.' - That applies to you.
Healthcare in Poland is FREE for residents and it's much easier to get to specialist than in UK. Also dental treatment is much more affordable in Poland than in UK, that's why British people go to Eastern European countries, not the other way round. Child Benefit is actually slightly higher in Poland than in UK, so I doubt she would apply for CB here.
Stop lying.

this ought to be a catalyst for government and employers to work together to offer opportunities to people in groups where unemployment is high. James Timpson was on the radio a little while ago talking about timpson’s experience in brining ex offenders into work. He wants to share that knowledge with others. Employers should be biting his arm off but they’re not. Prejudices run too deep I guess.

I work in accountancy which is a sector that isnt effected by cheap European labour being lost but we are massively struggling to recruit anyone. Because we are a training practise we get new students every year and a few years ago we were in a situation where there wasn’t enough jobs for the qualified students coming through, now we are so short and struggling to even recruit from outside, we are also struggling to recruit admin without any requirement for direct experience, I’m not sure where everyone has disappeared to

My local chemist was in meltdown yesterday. It had ‘lost’ my prescription that it had received 8 working days ago. It only had a pharmacist until 2 that day, and had no pharmacist due to work on Saturday.

The staff had been bullied and yelled at.

They're advertising for a manager, an assistant manager and 3 staff on their front door. They’re on their knees.

The staff had been bullied and yelled at.

Well there's part of the problem. Who would apply if they walked in to ask for more information/application form to see the current staff being yelled at and bullied and it being allowed?

Win-win for those in the company who are safely closeted in an office somewhere, making the decisions on how much to pay and what conditions their staff work under, not being yelled at every day, or unable to get their prescription and then shrugging their shoulders saying that they can't get any staff while not looking at and addressing why, and saving the money of those positions wages.
There's no incentive to change anything for them, but there's a huge one for the staff to change where they work to get away from it, or get so affected by it that they can't take any more.

I work/ed in care, LD. £9.50ph, think it may have gone up to £10.20 now. At first my employers were like you have to be available 7am-2/ 2-10pm, after a while they realised that any help was better than none and I was doing 9.30-2.30pm, yet they still wouldn’t advertise for different hours so anybody coming in would think they couldn’t do it unless available between the split shifts. Working through covid was difficult and stressful, for not a lot of money. Extra paperwork, extra tasks, being kept piled on us. Also our work paid a month in arrears, so if you worked through April for example, you’d get paid that at the end of may-flipping nightmare structure. Shifts full of agency as staff shortages, which leads to inconsistent care and opportunity for mistakes to be made.

have now taken on production work, over £12ph and get paid weekly, so fast cash. The workforce is 98% Romanian/polish/Portuguese. Hardly any British as long hours on feet and you can’t understand what most of them are saying, but its easy, unskilled work that fits in after school hours and doesn’t require me to find childcare, dp gets back from work and I leave.

care work at several pounds less per hour, with a lot of responsibility and pay that’s a month in arrears, or line work that requires little thinking , that’s paid more, with weekly pay, it’s a no brainier.

A lot of people have left or are leaving at the production work, a lot have gone back either to their home countries or other European countries.

The NHS pay is really low which puts people off, I just had a quick look... HR Advisor £25,655 to £31,534... I earn more than that currently in a lower/more junior HR role (outside of London). Yes the NHS pension is really good but in terms of other benefits you get more benefits and better pay in the private sector. Also... I applied for a few NHS jobs previously and the recruitment process just takes ages. They take forever to get back to you, interviews are scheduled weeks in advance and then you hear nothing. I didn't accept the job they offered because from application to being told I was successful took about two months, I found something else in that time.

The other issue companies have with recruitment (both private and public sector) is listing the bare legal minimum as benefits. If you're offering 20 (+Bank holidays)/28 inclusive of bank holidays days holiday, pension contributions, sick pay ect those aren't benefits. They are a legal requirement.

You can always tell when a company is offering the minimum when you start getting "free fruit in the office' "finish 1-2 hours early on a friday" "Christmas Party" "Free yoga" "Employee recognition scheme" in a bid to pad out the benefits to make the package look more attractive than it is. Free yoga isn't going to pay my bills is it?

The companies attracting staff are the ones who offer;
-Enhanced Mat/Pat pay (my partners company is 4 weeks fully paid for pat pay which isn't great but it's better than 2 weeks at £150ish a week. I work in higher education...18 weeks fully paid mat leave then half pay after that then it drops to SMP at some point)

-25+ days holiday (PLUS bank holidays)

-Enhanced company sick pay
-Enhanced pension contributions (my old job was 15%)
-Above average salaries
-Private healthcare/insurance
-Life Assurance
-Bonuses

The other issue companies have with recruitment (both private and public sector) is listing the bare legal minimum as benefits. If you're offering 20 (+Bank holidays)/28 inclusive of bank holidays days holiday, pension contributions, sick pay ect those aren't benefits. They are a legal requirement.

Exactly, though they're quite often refused in some sectors regularly. I worked in care, for 12 months straight and had every holiday request denied because of the needs of the business, sometimes at the last minute. They paid me for it, which although the money came in handy, did nothing the fact I needed a break, it also saved them money because they didn't have to pay me and someone else to cover those holidays. I think that was probably the driving force behind it, saving more money to add to their pot.
I left instead, and now I believe they're covering my shifts, as well as the extra ones I did regularly, with agency. I'm not lazy and I enjoyed the job, just not putting every living and breathing moment into it to make someone else some money while I struggled on minimum wage and got burned out, trying to work understaffed and with little resources to achieve the standards expected.
Costing them a lot more now.

SantiMakesMeLaugh I was wondering whether long covid is one factor causing staff shortages. Those numbers are truly scary.

Theres plenty of offenders in work. Its remarkably common. Someone did an FOI request for information on the criminal records of the men (and they are all men) working in the local authority roads maintenance crew and slightly over 1/3 of them had a conviction and not just for driving offences. Some had convictions for fraud for trying to sell materials or driveway maintenance and then over-charging or not carrying out the work. Doesn't seem to stop them getting employment at all (or drawing out repairs so that they get paid double and triple time for working extremely slowly).