British business will need its foreign language speakers（746 words）

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British business will need its foreign language speakers（746 words）

By Michael Skapinker

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Theresa May will trigger Article 50 on March 29, but much of UK business has no idea what Brexit will mean for them. During discussions in the past few weeks, I have heard of financial services companies applying for licences in EU countries in case they need to move some of their operations there. But most businesses are watching and waiting to assess what comes out of the negotiations.

There is one thing many companies are sure of: they cannot manage without their EU staff. It is not just the numbers of EU nationals working in many industries. Some companies are also desperate to hold on to the languages those citizens speak.

The head of training at a fashion company, speaking on a panel I recently chaired, said it is not true that all business is now done in English. Some retailers and distributors in Spain, France and Italy did not speak English well enough to do business in it, and some probably did not see why they should.

You buy in your own language and you sell in your customer’s, the old saying goes. We can update the second half of this: you sell in your customer’s choice of language. These days, that is often English, but not always. If customers insist on speaking their own language, you had better have people who can talk to them.

Many in the UK do speak another language. The 2011 census showed that 4.2m people — 7.7 per cent of the population in England and Wales — spoke a language other than English at home. The most widely spoken of those languages was Polish, used by 546,000 people, followed by Panjabi, Urdu and Bengali.

But the languages most in demand by UK business are French, German and Spanish, according to a survey last year by the CBI employers organisation and Pearson, the education group.

There are fewer speakers of those languages in England and Wales. The 2011 census showed that 147,000 spoke French as their main language; 77,000 spoke German and 120,000 Spanish. Not all of those people are available for recruitment by UK companies who need their languages skills. Many are already working, in English, in banking, information technology or the hotel and restaurant industries, and not all are adults.

The census includes all language speakers aged three and over. And the UK residency status of EU citizens post-Brexit is still unclear.

So where, post-Brexit, will UK companies find their foreign language speakers? Probably not among young Britons learning foreign languages.

It is true that the UK government has made efforts to improve language teaching in schools. Almost all English primary schools were doing at least some foreign language teaching in 2015-16, according to a report by the British Council.

The government is pushing the teaching of languages in secondary schools too, but the report said that since 2002, the number of students taking French A-levels, the school-leaving examination, had fallen by a third. Those studying German had fallen by nearly half. More students were studying Spanish and other languages, this was not enough to compensate for the falls in French and German.

Teachers said one of the reasons pupils did not want to learn languages was that it was hard. It is. Mastering another language requires huge motivation.

For non-English speakers, learning English yields a wealth of opportunities. Most senior jobs are unobtainable without the language. For native English speakers, the employment rewards are less obvious. You can get along in most jobs in the UK without another language. Not everyone wants to work for a fashion company with business on the continent.

What else can UK companies do to recruit foreign language speakers post-Brexit? If the outcome of the negotiations means these employees need work permits, companies can apply for them. But that adds to the cost. Another speaker on the panel I chaired said it cost £4,000 to get permits for each of his company’s Indian IT specialists.

Companies could also move departments that need foreign language speakers to one of the remaining 27 EU countries.

Best of all would be a Brexit agreement that allows EU workers to come and go as freely as they have done until now. That would be a relief to UK business of all sorts, not just those recruiting speakers of other languages.

But British prime minister Theresa May’s rhetoric suggests that is an unlikely outcome. In the meantime, employers worry and wait, and so do their foreign-language speaking staff.

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