Boris admits shortage of lab technicians as UK struggles to process coronavirus tests
Boris Johnson has said the pandemic has exposed the UK’s shortage of homegrown lab technicians and several other ‘crucial skills’, as he announced a raft of new measures to boost skills.
In a speech in Exeter, the Prime Minister said the UK was too heavily reliant on foreign workers for skilled and technical roles.
He said: ‘We have to face the fact that, at the moment, when we need them so much, there is a shortage of UK-trained lab technicians, just as there is a shortage of so many crucial skills.
‘We’re short of skilled construction workers and skilled mechanics, skilled engineers.
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‘We’re short of hundreds of thousands of IT experts. And it is not as though the market doesn’t require these skills – the market will pay richly.
‘The problem is one of supply.’
Earlier this month, the head of NHS Test and Trace said lab capacity had reached a ‘critical pinch-point’ across the UK as she apologised to people who couldn’t book a test.
The PM said the crisis had also revealed the ‘shortcomings’ of the educational system, as he pledged ‘life-long’ skills retraining opportunities.
He said: ‘Our economy has been shaken by Covid and in the hand-to-mouth scrambling of the pandemic, the shortcomings of the labour market and our educational system have been painfully apparent.’
Mr Johnson vowed to end what he called a ‘bogus distinction’ between further education (FE) and higher education (HE) in expanding the ability to get student loans.
The PM said: ‘We’ve got to end the pointless, nonsensical gulf that’s been fixed for generations, more than 100 years, between the so-called academic and so-called practical varieties of education.
‘It’s absurd to talk about skills in this limited way. Now is the time to end this bogus distinction between FE and HE.
‘We’re going to change the funding model so that it’s just as easy to get a student loan to do a year of electrical engineering at an FE college, or do two years of electrical engineering, as it is to get a loan to do a three-year degree in politics, philosophy and economics.’
He also said that apprenticeships would be ‘portable’ so they can move between employers.
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