We asked you to submit your questions to candidates standing in the 2024 General Election.
From all your submissions, we chose 10 that represented the broad issues you wanted answers to.
We’ll be publishing a question a day with the responses from the candidates who replied from each constituency.
The first answers are from candidates standing in the Whitehaven & Workington constituency.
Your first question:
How will you encourage foreign workers to come to Cumbria so that the hospitality, health and care sectors can function and don’t need to close because of lack of staff?
Andrew Johnson, the Conservative Party
We need to start to wean ourselves off the reliance on foreign workers to fill vacancies within the economy, including those sectors mentioned.
We need to do more to encourage and support people back to work and look to encourage greater mobility of the UK workforce to consider Cumbria as a location.
We also need to work much harder in promoting the hospitality and health sectors as career choices for young people and match the skills those businesses and organisations require with the education system.
Chris Wills, Liberal Democrats
Foreign works are so currently vital that our care services and NHS would collapse without them. There should be an awareness campaign about this as I am sadly meeting too many people who do not understand our reliance upon workers from abroad.
These people who come to the UK to provide a service which is not happening otherwise need welcoming and made to feel part of our community. One day our own UK citizens might emerge to fill the service gaps, until that point it is futile and, in fact, cruel not to welcome the people we need.
Good quality housing of various types, in locations that benefit the foreign workers should be provided. Simultaneously we need to attach a rocket to social housing availability – it is wrong to allow friction over the likes of housing.
We need protected spaces in our community centres for foreign workers to come together, but a central place in Cumberland should be established too. This central place wouldn’t just be a haven but it would provide an HQ for support groups and people.
Josh MacAlister, Labour
These sectors are currently reliant on overseas workers and will need to be for some time.
We’ve actually been quite successful at getting overseas workers here, particularly to work in our health service.
I’d like to thank the hundreds of doctors, nurses and care staff from overseas who have made Cumbria their home.
But our reliance on overseas recruitment is a result of a failure to recruit and train people here.
Labour will recruit and train thousands more health and care workers to get our NHS back on its feet and I’ll be working with local universities to expand places and get local people on to those courses.
Challenges with hospitality include poor transport connectivity to get people from some of our towns to the jobs in the hospitality sector and we need to deliver significant improvements in bus services.
Jill Perry, the Green Party
Greens are proud internationalists and recognise the role that migrants have played in building our country, currently play and hopefully will play in the future.
People have always moved around, and in many places borders are merely lines drawn on a map.
We would end the hostile environment which has severely damaged our reputation as a welcoming country, we would welcome researchers and students to our universities and allow them to bring their families with them.
We would also end the minimum income requirement for people working here legally to be allowed to bring their spouses.
We would also allow migrants and asylum seekers to work while their applications are being processed. There is a severe shortage of many kinds of workers that both Brexit and Covid has exacerbated and we need to regain our outward-looking view of the world.
David Surtees, Reform UK
Cumbria Crack received no answers from Mr Surtees. Just before the election was called, he was diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing six weeks of treatment, which he said had curtailed his ability to campaign.
