As the new minister for immigration, one of the first tasks for MP Caroline Nokes is to publish the Home Office’s long-awaited White Paper on a post-Brexit immigration system. Despite a running delay on publication to date, Home Office officials have been working to engage and seek the views of business and trade bodies. As part of this exercise, the CIPD has recently been invited to sit on the Home Office’s primary employer forum of some fifteen organisations that will feed in research and insights, and act as a sounding board to ministers and civil servants as they construct a future immigration policy.

The forum will play an important role alongside the evidence collected in the White Paper and the ongoing work that the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) is undertaking. The first session of the forum will take place on 19 January.

Being on the forum provides the CIPD with an excellent opportunity to showcase the research we have conducted on what employers want from a post-Brexit immigration system. During the first half of 2017, the CIPD undertook a large project with the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) to gauge employer views. It consisted of a survey of 1000 employers, six roundtables up and down the country (including London, Cardiff and Glasgow) as well as 26 in-depth case study interviews. Our report, published in June 2017, provided an important wealth of data and workable recommendations that attracted interest not only from the Home Office but also HM Treasury, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and Department for Work & Pensions.

Engagement with MPs and Select Committees

Apart from informing government thinking, the CIPD is also actively seeking to influence debate within Parliament. In November, Ben Willmott, Gerwyn Davies and Paddy Smith from the Public Policy team, met with Yvette Cooper, the Home Affairs Select Committee Chair, to discuss our research. Over the course of the year, the team had also met with Hilary Benn, Chair of the Exiting the EU Select Committee, Kate Green, Chair of the APPG on Migration, and Stuart McDonald, Immigration Spokesperson for the SNP to share the insights from our members.

Elevating the voice of the profession

As our invitation to the Home Office forum shows, the CIPD has been seen as an authoritative voice in the post-Brexit immigration debate. Our membership and the HR profession as a whole are at the coal face of organisations with respect to recruitment and people management issues, and it is their views and experiences that we have drawn on to provide our insight and expertise. We will continue to canvass employer views to surface new data for the immigration debate as part of our next quarterly Labour Market Outlook, which is due out in February.

Partnering the profession

As we continue to gather insight and input into future immigration policy, the CIPD is also working to support its members. Recognising the large number of organisations with EU nationals in their workforce, we have collaborated with Fragomen LLP to create a practical guide to help HR and employers manage and support their migrant workforce through Brexit.

While the ongoing Brexit negotiations mean the results are still far from certain, the level of access to EU skills and labour the UK has enjoyed is likely to be impacted, and employers cannot afford to simply ‘wait and see’ in a competitive context before making plans for the future. Workforce planning therefore, has risen to top the priorities and in the coming months we will be publishing more practical guidance, available from our Brexit Hub, that will support our members through this process.