Northern Ireland employers 'could be forced to relocate' after Brexit

Stormont, Northern Ireland. Photo: Getty

A key Northern Ireland business group has warned that the findings of the Migration Advisory Committee, which urge the UK to drastically limit the post-Brexit immigration of low-skilled workers, could force employers to relocate to the Republic of Ireland.

The Northern Ireland branch of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), which speaks on behalf of 190,000 UK businesses, said that the plan “risks damaging labour shortages.” While the report from the committee notes that a restrictive approach to immigration from the EU could harm the region’s agri-food industry, it “fails to offer a workable alternative,” the group warned on Tuesday (18 September).

“There is a danger that NI employers could be forced to relocate to the Republic of Ireland to maintain their competitive advantage if the already tight local labour supply is further restricted,” the CBI said in a statement.

The agricultural and food processing sectors, which rely on low-skilled workers, employ around 70,000 people in Northern Ireland.

The Migration Advisory Committee report, which was commissioned in July 2017, is likely to inform the contents of the government’s immigration white paper — something that will in turn heavily influence the UK’s negotiation strategy with the EU. The report concludes that the UK benefits to a much greater degree from the migration of high-skilled workers compared to those classed as low-skilled, and as such recommends that the country’s post-Brexit policy should take this into account.

A 2017 analysis by the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry found that EU workers from outside the UK and Ireland were important to the operation of almost half of its member businesses. In the third quarter of 2017, around two thirds of businesses reported that they had greater difficulty with recruiting migrant workers from the EU compared to before the June 2016 Brexit vote.

The CBI said that any system should work for “the whole UK” and take into account “Northern Ireland’s unique challenges.”