Hundreds of visiting workers on short-term employment permits are set to be allowed unexpectedly to remain in the island under a temporary extension scheme being developed by the Home Affairs Committee.
They were due to be forced to leave as they came to the end of their third and final annual employment permit under a policy agreed by the States three years ago.
Home Affairs also announced yesterday that it will carry out a full review of the short-term employment permit system and look at improving the efficiency of the Population Management Office which is believed to be under-resourced.
‘The committee has now received representations, particularly from the hospitality industry, that the short-term employment length should be increased to four years,’ said Home Affairs president Marc Leadbeater.
‘As a committee, the last thing we would want is to put undue pressure on our valuable hospitality sector at the start of the summer season, but the short-term nature of a short-term employment permit is fundamental.
‘At our meeting on Tuesday, we agreed to explore a temporary extension policy to the existing three-year permit while a more comprehensive review of the cap is considered as part of the planned wider work on the population regime.’
Individuals with short-term employment permits are allowed to live in the island but are banned from bringing in dependants and must leave well before qualifying for permanent or long-term settlement rights.
The scheme was set up in 2023 as a temporary solution to a labour shortage, but many of the annual permits issued at that time, and reissued twice since, are now the subject of applications for long-term employment permits, which has caused a spike in work facing the Population Management Office.
Holders of long-term employment permits are vetted more thoroughly when applying, can bring dependants to the island and may eventually qualify for settlement rights.
Home Affairs’ temporary extension scheme is likely to apply to all sectors of the economy, but will be of greatest benefit to hospitality.
‘The Guernsey Hospitality Association is keen to avoid instability for our industry,’ said GHA president Alan Sillett, just before yesterday’s announcement.
‘We are engaging with Home Affairs, Economic Development, other deputies and the Population Management Office to help secure a positive and workable solution.
‘We welcome the constructive engagement from all parties.
‘Discussions are ongoing, and we are hopeful that progress will be made shortly.’
Home Affairs will work next week on the details of its temporary extension scheme.
Deputy Leadbeater said it was appropriate for his committee to look again at the policy introduced by its predecessors, but reiterated that short-term employment permits could not become a route to permanent residency.
‘While we are going into this work with a genuinely open mind, short-term employment permits are, as the name suggests, short term, and so we encourage businesses with staff coming to the end of such a permit to consider starting recruitment processes in good time,’ he said.
In recent months, the Population Management Office website has contained the following notice: ‘Our processing times for our applications are taking longer than we would like at the moment.
‘This is as a result of an increase in volume of applications and complexity.’