James Ashton: Need for clarity on Theresa May’s talent plans

James Ashton: The Prime Minister says that “openness to international talent must remain one of this country’s most distinctive assets”
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James Ashton30 January 2017

The only thing missing from Theresa May’s recent Global Britain speech was spelling out what part global talent will play in the strategy.

Clarifying how world-class workers will continue to be welcomed at the UK’s world-beating businesses might seem a quaint request given Donald Trump’s latest actions, but thousands of internationally minded companies run from the capital are eager to know.

London has one of the most international workforces in the world, with 616,000 people born elsewhere in Europe — 12.5% of the entire workforce — working here.

It also has more international students and more foreign direct investment projects than any other city in the world. There is a lot to lose.

The Prime Minister says that “openness to international talent must remain one of this country’s most distinctive assets” — within the envelope of reducing net migration to tens of thousands a year of course.

Yet even the European Union nationals already living in the UK — of which there is a great concentration in the capital — aren’t clear yet whether they are free to stay on after Brexit.

We are beginning to get some detail from the banks about how many posts they must shift abroad if they can no longer passport into the single market from London. A thousand here, a thousand there: the view is that that is manageable and the City will hang onto its European supremacy. In other industries, change has a lower profile.

A friend at one of London’s universities tells me that overseas undergraduate applications are buoyant because visa uncertainty has been offset by the weakness in sterling. On the flip side, some foreign academics who typically sign up for five-year tenures are choosing to go elsewhere because their worker rights are unclear — as is their EU research funding.

How unfortunate that firms are encouraged to trade abroad without a clear sense yet of how they can hire abroad.

To borrow a line from London First’s 2036 jobs and growth agenda, we must preserve London as “the place where global business can find talent, and the place where global talent can find opportunity”.