Jobs: Government's Brexit incompetence leaves Britain facing worst of all worlds

Recruiter PageGroup is reporting a sharp decline in UK earnings, but its business in the rest of Europe is steaming ahead

Candidates line up for a job interview, but British professionals are increasingly wary of taking the risk of moving (Rex)

The clear takeaway from recruiter PageGroup’s latest set of numbers is this: People are scared. So are businesses.

Page is an international business, and almost all of its figures for the third quarter of 2017 were trending in the right direction with the notable exception of its biggest market: the UK.

It showed a 7.6 per cent fall in earnings, with the confidence of both Page’s clients, who are wary of hiring, and candidates, who are wary of moving, battered by a Government in hock to a destructive corps of extremists hell bent on presiding over Britain crashing out of the EU with no deal.

It speaks volumes that another recruiter, Harvey Nash, released the results of a survey of 130 ‘business leaders’ showing that four fifths of them felt the Government was making either quite a bad or a very bad job of the process. The sample size is small, but the results should hardly come as a surprise.

Meanwhile the rest of Europe, characterised by hardline Brexiteers as struggling under the yoke of the European Commission, is doing just fine thank you very much.

Page's earnings in France were up by more than a fifth. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland all grew in excess of 15 per cent. Spain did too, although you would expect that to be impacted by the country’s convulsions over Catalonia before too long.

At this point, some readers might care to raise a question: Isn’t one of the negative consequences of Brexit supposed to be labour shortages? If so, what’s going on?

The answer is, as ever, a complicated one.

Page deals chiefly with white collar professionals earning between £35,000 and £110,000. The roles they perform make it worth employers worth stumping up its fees, which can be considerable.

Thanks to the chronic uncertainty created by the Govenrment mishandling of Brexit, rather than committing resources to hiring at this level employers are choosing to make do where they can, and rely on short termers where that’s not possible. It is notable when you drill down into Page’s numbers that the business of placing temps - down 2 per cent - fared considerably better than the business of placing permanent staff, where the decline was 10 per cent.

What helps employers (a bit) is the fact that the professionals they have are wary of moving. When things look bad people tend to stay put because when redundancies occur its inevitably last in first out.

What's not changing is that shortgages continue to occur in areas of demand, where Britain fails to produce sufficient people to fill roles as it is, and where it will continue to do so even in a downturn.

The NHS is a good example. The hospitality sector is another. Farming and retail, will also be hit if the Government continues with the destructive approach to immigration it has adopted.

When it comes to labour markets, its policies are creating shortages is some sectors, crippling uncertainty in others. In other words, Theresa May's wretched Government is leaving Britain facing the worst of all worlds.