Staff shortages in tourist areas.

[StaffShortages]

I've just returned from the Lake District and there's a severe shortage of staff, partly due to Brexit but also apparently because of a lack of affordable accommodation. One chip shop was offering £14 an hour for a counter assistant. Many restaurants shut for a day or two because of staff shortages.

Is the same happening in other touristy parts of the UK?

Perhaps the businesses should get together band bus the workers in, like Centre Parcs do.

My 17yo found the hard to get work because the places want people with experience. And the min wage for her age group is significantly lower but they want the same level of experience and commitment of full time adult workers. There used to be roles that were there for youngsters to start at the bottom.

The other problem for us living rurally is lack of decent bus routes and times. Last bus home is 6.15 from our local town but it doesn’t connect with the bus that leaves her workplace so she is reliant on lifts until she passes her driving test.

I live just outside the Lake District and there's a huge issue with affordable housing. My parents are in the National Park itself but there's no way DH and I could afford a home there, even with us not having children and both working full-time.

Then they have to pay better to retain those staff. If you pay the minimum you can get away with people will always have one foot out the door.

I live/ work somewhere touristy. Housekeeping is always in short supply. Some places offer up to £14 an hour plus guaranteed hours in winter. Oddly enough they have few issues with staff retention/ recruitment of experienced staff. Some offer 10.42 an hour and sack people at the end of the season and are surprised when no one local will work for them.

Don't you think they are worth £14 an hour OP

Often these places are too picky on who they want to employ, that's one reason they have no staff

If employees for those jobs are working somewhere like St Ives then they will likely live in a different non-tourist town say 10 miles away. Now the rents/house prices in that town have risen, combined with fuel prices and car parking charges and those jobs are suddenly no longer feasible.

This is where social housing comes in.

If the government built more and rented them only to locals then it would help a lot of these towns out.

Born and raised in Tenby. Can't afford to live there. Neither can my school friends, who also grew up there. Even the 2/3 bed semi detached houses on new build estates are getting swept up by second home buyers, there's nowhere for the locals to actually buy to raise their families.

They are planning this is Gwynedd. It's a great idea and I hope it spreads far and wide.
Owning holiday homes/airbnbs is morally dubious. It's mad to me to think that people think it's acceptable to buy properties just to make money when there is a housing crisis. Why do YOU deserve two homes when many many people don't even have one?

Something really needs to be done about second homes. It’s not fair on locals being priced out of their areas. They don’t support the same services that a resident population supports so hairdressers, etc are struggling.

The tourist businesses struggle for staff, I have been visiting the Lake District at least 3x a year for twenty years and two years ago when I went I was shocked by how things were. Definitely bigger numbers of tourists which maybe was down to covid still putting people off going abroad but things like going to somewhere for lunch where I’ve gone multiple times before. Always walked in no problem, now the queue was over an hour. I haven’t been back to the Lake District since. Went to Yorkshire last year and Scotland this year. So ultimately people won’t return (which may be a good thing as the Lakes particularly were saturated beyond capacity).

In many areas there's no room for more houses - that's part of the problem. The land around these tourist areas is all privately owned - it's not available to be built on.

They’ve the same problem in Ibiza and other Balearic Islands. Mainly cuz of Airbnb. Landlord prefer to get loads of cash via short renting so people going to Ibiza to work don’t have accommodation so are struggling with shortage of staff

Friends of mine own holiday homes in a tourist spot, multiple houses in one town hundreds of miles from where they live. The council have introduced a higher council tax for holiday homes, but they can afford it easily. They rent the houses out for something like 1k a week. Agree there needs to be licences and council permission.

One of the tourist attractions round here have resorted to a free staff mini bus from the local villages.

I can’t imagine they’ll keep it free for long as it’s costing them for the bus, the driver and the fuel, but it’s kept them going.

And has helped the teens who can’t drive yet land summer jobs. For the last few years they’ve struggled to get jobs there anymore as so many older people were looking for work and they were prioritised as they weren’t going to disappear off to Uni

Hotels provide local people with work. Air B&B deprives local people of a home.

I was chatting to a waitress in Cornwall last month. She said that 3 others had quit the pub that month - due to customers. She said the way some spoke to them was horrendous and many just can't cope with it.

She also said that the pubs and restaurants use the minimum pay rates for the younger staff - and that they can get the standard minimum wage at the Supermarket, so most tried to get work there.

The staff shortages are everywhere if you haven't noticed .

Well done Brexit

I think as well Brexit has pushed more wealthy retirees to buy a second home here rather than Spain or France due to the issues.
I know a couple who have bought in Cornwall and another Lakes area for their retirement.

Just a comment about hospitality not wanting to put the effort into young people because they go off to uni etc.
If they are a good employer you could have that youngster from 15-21 every holiday. I did that and stayed loyal to my employer and they knew every holiday would be on the roster for X number of shifts.

You're right though about no staff left to live in the area especially the semi-rural beauty spots with poor transport. I work in care in a similar area very popular with tourists and we have transport for our carers from the larger town down the road. It's so hard to retain staff.

@RhymesWithTangerine ·
If there is no housing and no transport then there will be no workers.
Build houses on fields. Not many fields but definitely some.

There is enough housing already but it's not available as a homes. There are 2, 3 and 4 bedrooms let as 'airbnb'. There isn't much work because the school has shut and the shop has shut. The tourist do not spend locally, but use it as a base. There are plenty of tourist attractions about 15-30 miles away.

@RhymesWithTangerine

Ordnance Survey data suggests that all the buildings in the UK - houses, shops, offices, factories, greenhouses - cover 1.4% of the total land surface. Looking at England alone, the figure still rises to only 2%. Buildings cover less of Britain than the land revealed when the tide goes out

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41901297.amp

However much you pay young students, they're always going to leave to go back to university and then ultimately leave the area to get decent jobs when they graduate.

Customers are already whingeing and moaning about high prices in tourist areas! High prices are needed to pay staff more obviously. You can't have it both ways. You can't have cheap food/drink served to you AND want experienced/highly paid staff serving you!

Restaurants, cafes and shops are already screwed in tourist areas with high rents, and now insanely high (unlimited) power costs, that adding a few pounds per hour to their staff wages would push them over the edge.

The problem is holiday homes, AirBnBs etc which have massively pushed up prices and priced out the young locals.

Run down public transport options doesn't help either. Bars & restaurants etc have opening hours outside the normal working day, but local authorities continue to cut subsidies etc so bus firms don't run full services in the evenings and weekends, some places have no service at all in the evening or Sundays - that's a fat lot of use for hospitality staff who finish at 11pm isn't it??

Also, lack of decent jobs, caused by centralisation of organisations into London sucking in graduates etc from all over the country, means even the better educated/higher paid graduates can't return to their home towns because there are no decent jobs locally. If you've got a degree in engineering or actuarial science, you're hardly going to go back to living in the Lake District to work in a bar, are you??

This is news I can use. Thanks for the link.

People have no idea how much space there is. And how un-green agriculture is and how beneficial gardens are.

Fucks sale people! For sacrificing very little countryside, young couples can actually start families in houses with gardens and parking spaces. People have just got to stop being such dicks about planning.

@1dayatatime , rewilding is a con. The agricultural land is sprayed with glyphosate to kill anything growing on it and then left to do it's own thing.
What ends up growing there are thuggish weeds like thistles.

The beautiful countryside we see in places like the Lake District are the way they are because the land is managed. The land is fine for sheep farming but not for arable.

Those with 'airbnb' stopped the building of windturbines because they would ruin the view.

There were staff shortages in the Lake District long before Brexit!

This problem isn't new. It's been a problem for a couple of decades at least because of the insane house prices in tourist areas and the increase in holiday homes, Air BNBs etc which take homes away from the locals housing market.

We went for a short break to the Lakes for my 50th birthday, 9 years ago, and even back then, we noticed "staff wanted" signs on lots of shop, cafe, and restaurant doors in Ambleside. I used to work in Cumbria, so knew there were problems, but hadn't realised how bad it had got!

I'm not saying Brexit hasn't made it worse, but the "free market" certainly hadn't solved the labour shortage problems that Remainers make out was the case!