Three-quarters of waitstaff, a quarter of chefs and 37 percent of housekeeping staff working in Britain are from elsewhere in the EU | Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images UK hospitality sector to face staff shortages after Brexit Leading industry body said hospitality and tourism would be crippled by tight restrictions on EU migration.

The hospitality sector faces a shortfall of 60,000 workers a year if immigration from the EU is too tightly controlled after Brexit, the British Hospitality Association (BHA) warned in a report Friday.

The hospitality sector in the U.K. is "highly reliant"on workers from other EU countries, as they represent almost one quarter of the sector’s workforce, according to the KPMG report commissioned by BHA. "The labor shortfall 10 years after Brexit would be 1 million if EU migration fell to zero from 2019," KPMG wrote.

Three-quarters of waitstaff, a quarter of chefs and 37 percent of housekeeping staff working in Britain are from elsewhere in the EU, according to the report.

Some 3 million people work in the hospitality industry in the U.K., with the sector accounting for about a tenth of the U.K.'s economic wealth.

BHA said the sector needed to reduce the sector's dependance on EU workers. It has sent the government a 10-year plan to train up British staff, target older workers and encourage younger people to take up jobs in the sector.

“Hospitality and tourism face major problems in recruitment if there is any major cut in the number of workers allowed to enter from the EU," said Ufi Ibrahim, chief executive of the BHA. "We want to avoid there being any cliff edge but the government must be aware that in the medium to long term we will still need considerable numbers of EU workers."

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