Status: 08.10.2021 9.45 a.m.
What are the chances for the change in the British economy announced by Boris Johnson? Not only the German-British Chamber of Commerce and Industry (AHK) is critical and warns of further bottlenecks.
According to the head of the German-British Chamber of Commerce and Industry (AHK), Ulrich Hoppe, British consumers have to be prepared for occasional further bottlenecks. “It will be bumpy. You will make certain compromises in service quality and time reliability. You will certainly feel that then,” said Hoppe about the refusal of the government in London to address the acute shortage of skilled workers in the country with long-term easing of the immigration rules that have been tightened since Brexit to fight.
Higher wages, higher productivity?
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for a comprehensive reform course to strengthen the domestic economy at the Tories’ party conference a few days ago. Instead of relying on cheap labor from abroad, companies in the country should pay better salaries and thus bring more Britons into wages, Johnson said.
Despite the current supply crisis, the prime minister spread confidence: his government had initiated a “long overdue change of course” which in the long term would lead to an upswing with “high wages” and “high productivity”. Hoppe does not consider Johnson’s strategy to be plausible: “That will not work on a large scale in the short term and is more likely to harbor the risk of inflation,” commented the AHK expert.
“A generational task”
Increasing the productivity of the British economy has been the goal of various governments for many decades, explains Hoppe. But that requires a long-term plan to reform vocational training. And that is a generation task. “It won’t work out within the next five years.”
The AHK boss also considers the idea that British jobseekers could fill the gaps left by workers who have returned to Eastern Europe in the low-wage sector to be unsustainable due to the low unemployment rate.
“Not an endless sponge”
Criticism was also expressed from the business world. She is portrayed as a bogeyman, but the problem is much bigger, Richard Walker, head of the Iceland supermarket chain, told the Times. “We want to pay our people as much as possible, but companies are not an endless sponge that can soak up infinite costs. We will have higher energy prices, more truck drivers, more packaging costs.” This cannot be done all at once. Many smaller companies in particular are at risk.
A representative of the Federation of Small Businesses, which represents the smaller British companies as an association, told Times Radio that they no longer felt they were being taken into account by the Conservative Party. The opposition Labor Party is currently the only one with concrete offers for small businesses.