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 asked every candidate we had contact details for to respond.
We’ll be publishing them in the run-up to the General Election with the responses from the candidates who replied from each constituency.
These are the answers are from candidates standing in the Barrow & Furness constituency.
Your 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?
Adrian Waite, Liberal Democrats
The hospitality, health and care sectors in Cumbria are unable to offer the services that they would wish to, due to a lack of appropriately qualified staff.
I think that the solution to the problem lies in a combination of training local people and encouraging them to seek careers in these sectors and recruiting foreign workers where this is appropriate.
Therefore, we would:
- Exempt NHS and care staff from the £1,000-a-year Immigration Skills Charge and reverse the ban on care workers bringing partners and children.
- Expand the youth mobility scheme.
- Protect the rights of European Union citizens and their families in Britain.
- Overhaul the Immigration Rules to make them simpler, clearer and fairer, and ensure greater parliamentary scrutiny of future changes.
Barry Morgan, Reform UK
Wrong question. This tactic of gaslighting politicians for not embracing a growth model dependent on foreign workers is for the birds; we need to train up and incentivise our own people and those already in-country to do this work.
Lisa Morgan, Party of Women
As most of these jobs tend to be taken by women, reassuring female foreign workers, especially those with certain cultural backgrounds, that they will be safe and respected would make a big difference in getting them to work here.
