'Recruiting problems' 10 years on from Brexit vote

Recruiting staff in the Bailiwick of Guernsey into hospitality and building housing are still seeing impacts from the Brexit referendum 10 years on.

In 2016, people in the UK and Gibraltar were balloted on the UK's membership of the European Union (EU), with 52% saying they wanted to leave.

Channel Islanders did not get to vote because the islands were never part of the EU. However, the island benefited from certain parts of membership through an agreement called "protocol three".

Criticisms of situations a decade on from the vote and the UK's EU exit in 2020, include extra effort and costs needed to deal with additional paperwork, as well as waiting times before people could take up posts.

Tracey Farquhar-Beck, director of the Blonde Hedgehog in Alderney, said recruitment was the biggest problem her business faced.

She said paperwork was putting foreign workers off coming to the bailiwick for work.

Farquhar-Beck said: "We relied on attracting people from overseas and now that's very difficult because anybody in Europe is faced with visa applications and additional paperwork, additional costs, waiting times.

"Also, because Alderney is such a small island and doesn't have a pool of potential employees, we have to look further afield and to attract these people.

"Now we tend to have to go through recruiters, and that increases our already escalating costs.

"There was a day when everybody wanted to come to the UK and to the Channel Islands to work in hospitality, and now it's very few and far between.

"The people that we have, we like to keep, but then we can only keep them for a certain period of time. When they're not allowed to come back any longer, that again is another layer of difficulty for us."

However, Jamie Blodel, director of World Travel in Guernsey, said he did not see a big difference in the number of people looking to book a holiday since the changes.

He said: "[My] first concern was how was it going to change with people travelling to Europe.

"For Guernsey or Channel Island passport-holders... our biggest concern was when they were going to bring [travel rules] in how it was to change, whether you'd need visas, whether you'd need any documents to travel in.

"But they kind of said from the outset that nothing was going to change immediately, so we knew we had time to sort things out."

Deputy Lindsay de Sausmarez, President of Policy and Resources, previously said that Brexit had contributed to problems in house building.

Follow BBC Guernsey on X and Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to channel.islands@bbc.co.uk.