It has been great to see so many of our small businesses across the county getting back to work in the last few weeks, writes our columnist, Phil Collier, FSB Area Leader for Cumbria. But issues around staffing and supply chain problems have left many scratching their heads as they try to navigate a way back to viability and profitability.
Furlough numbers across the county are falling, which is welcome as long as this because people are going back to work. We do expect that there will be redundancies made between now and the end of the year as furlough ends, but there are encouraging signs that employers are trying to bring staff back, even if contracts may need to be amended for this to happen.
Businesses thrive off certainty and the ability to plan ahead. At the moment there is still uncertainty around how our economy will develop over the short term, which is making it difficult to predict the demand for goods and services and consequently what staffing levels businesses will need to meet this demand.
We are also aware that there are complications specific to some of our key sectors in the county.
In the construction and manufacturing sectors there are reports of good levels of demand, but issues around getting hold of component parts to make goods or complete jobs. This is down to issues with getting hold of goods or parts from abroad and a lack of locally-sourcable alternatives. It would be great if we could have local supply chains to help with this but these take a lot of time and expertise to set up and wont help tackle our immediate difficulties. In the meantime customers might have to get used to orders taking longer to be fulfilled or jobs taking longer to be booked in.
Hospitality has real recruitment problems at the moment due to a shortage of labour. Many European workers haven’t returned to the UK this year and while furlough numbers are falling there remain around 5% of people away from work for this reason. FSB is working with partners including Cumbria Tourism and JobCentre Plus to see how we can potentially bring jobseekers and those with vacancies together. Cumbria Tourism have set up a Jobs Vacancy page FOR Tourism and Hospitality businesses at http://www.cumbriatourism.org/job-ad-upload/ which is a great step forward and will hopefully help lots of firms and individuals.
We are also hearing that a major shortage of delivery drivers is affecting the movement of goods around the country. This as much as the ‘pingdemic’ amongst retailers is responsible for the shortages we are sometimes seeing in our shops and supermarkets. The distribution sector also has challenges around attracting people to work in the short and medium term.
We are entering a new period with our economy it seems and we need plans and actions to tackle these and other problems.
Its not a reason to sound the panic alarms, but is enough to make us ponder how our economy functions in the future.
