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 Westmorland & Lonsdale constituency.
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?
Tim Farron, Liberal Democrats
I am campaigning for a youth mobility visa scheme with European countries so young people from abroad can come and work here and help our local businesses to operate and thrive.
But we should also encouraging and training our own young people into these important sectors. We achieve that by providing truly affordable housing so that young people can stay and work here in Cumbria.
And particularly in social care, it’s about paying those people who care for our loved ones a decent wage for the incredible work they do.
James Townley, Reform UK
The lack of staff is mainly due to the scarcity of affordable housing in the area.
Although “affordable” homes are being built, their prices are still relative to the existing house prices, making them unaffordable for young people.
Our so-called affordable houses often starting at £500,000. Additionally, there is a distinct lack of existing housing, partly due to the prevalence of second homes. Property owners should be incentivised to let these homes out affordably to local residents.
Many businesses are forced to bus their staff in from distant areas, which is off-putting to new staff and makes retaining staff difficult when they have to commute for almost two hours a day.
The hospitality sector, as seen during COVID-19, should also receive VAT cuts to support them and enable higher wages that could help retain staff longer.
We have many young without work in Westmorland & Lonsdale and we should be encouraging them into the hospitality sectors and also advertising options for further training into sectors such as healthcare, showing them the future they can have working locally.
Bar work for instance can often be perceived as interim work. But it doesn’t stop there, you progress to management roles or cheffing or even running their own premises. The future should be highlighted.
Izzy Solabarrieta, Heritage Party
oreign workers are welcome and needed right now in Cumbria to fill the skills shortages that we have following decades of managed decline. I would hope these workers would have an enjoyable and productive stay here.
With the area already suffering an acute lack of housing, I would look at temporarily contracting with hotels or other short term accommodation providers, to ensure workers have somewhere to live without taking homes that are needed for local families.
Long term however, we need to be training British people to work in British healthcare. Bringing in workers from abroad leaves the huge unanswered question of who is providing the healthcare in their own country? Who is filling the gaps created when people come here?
We need an overhaul of our education system so that young people leave school with the skills, attitude and confidence that will enable them to move into a satisfying career.
To quote the Heritage Party manifesto: “Our country should train enough doctors, dentists, pharmacists, nurses and midwives to work in the healthcare… There should be no caps on the number of places for British citizens to train to be doctors and dentists at university, or to train on-the-job to be nurses and midwives.
“Nurses should spend the majority of their time on wards giving practical care and we will once again make nursing a profession with on-the-job training.”
The situation could be turned around in just a few years. Following this, we will always welcome foreign professionals and students who want to spend time here, learning from and with us and sharing their knowledge with their British colleagues, but it would be intended that such a stay would be temporary and he or she would then be able to return to benefit his or her own country.
And I would expect British professionals to also travel abroad, in an international sharing of knowledge that could benefit all humanity.
Phil Clayton, the Green Party
Replace the Conservative’s salary-based entry criteria with something based on need: so we would work with industry to identify what skills were needed, and then allow companies to recruit externally.
