An odd story which I heard on BBC radio the other weekend – I haven’t checked any details – told us that Tesco have been recruiting managers from Czechoslovakia because they are unable, despite their best efforts, to fill posts in new stores with local applicants.
The reason for giving a reaction without checking the details is that it occurred to me that this may represent a problem of labour mobility which is caused by the difficulties in the housing market, rather than by a complete lack of qualified British candidates. These complications could have made families, in particular, unwilling to take the risk of moving to a new job in another part of the country, especially if they expect to have to move again for further career progress. If they have a house which they can afford, in an area where the schools are good, they may fear, particularly if that first move is away from the South East, that they would not be able to afford to move back because of differential rises in house prices or the risk of mortgage famine. Instead people would prefer to settle for a longer commute, which limits their search area for new jobs.
There has been little interest in the patterns & problems of internal migration since the 70s. Certainly little coverage in the media or regular press releases from ONS though there has been some interest recently in reaction to the BBC relocation to Salford.
The movement of population from the north & from the other constituent countries of the UK used to be a constant focus of political concern. Initiatives such as the Hardman dispersals of the civil service, & limits on office building in London were taken. But in the 1980s recession the victims just stayed & decayed in the old industrial areas.
There are not, now, the same opportunities for a man, maybe a father, to migrate to the south east on his own, leaving the family at home, while he finds a high-wage job in the booming south. There is not the low-cost accommodation in hostels, B&Bs, bedsits or lodgings in private houses that used to make this a possibility, nothing that would allow him to send back home enough to pay the mortgage. Even if he does, like many young Poles did , share a high-rental property, living at high density with similar migrants, the amount of money he could save to send home to the family each week would not go far enough in Manchester in the same way that it would in an eastern European country.
On the other hand, there may just be a real shortage of people in the age group normally recruited to such posts, because of the low birth rates of the 1970s.
