House of Lords committee told firm will struggle to attract enough staff if it cannot recruit EU nationals after Brexit

Just one in 50 applicants for jobs at Pret a Manger are British, its director of human resources told a parliamentary committee.

The high street chain employs 110 different nationalities with 65% of its workforce coming from EU countries other than Britain, Andrea Wareham told the House of Lords economic affairs select committee on Wednesday.

She said the company would find it virtually impossible to find enough staff if it were forced to turn its back on EU nationals after Brexit.

“[The difficulty], it’s not in selecting, it’s a difficulty in attracting, I would say one in 50 people who apply to our company to work is British.

“If I had to fill all our vacancies with British-only people I would not be able to fill them because of the lack of applications,” she said in the first detailed public pronouncement the company has made since the referendum.

Wareham said she did not think pay was a factor – even in London where the starting package of £16,000 a year would barely be enough to cover a worker’s rent.

She said staff can earn “really good money” with pay, including bonuses, rising to £40,000 to £45,000 “within a few years” of joining.

“We are entirely accepting that the number of EU nationals will go down over time. We would love to increase the number of British nationals and we are excited about this,” she said, adding that one of her concerns was that the government was not doing enough to focus on solutions post-Brexit for low-skilled immigrant workers.

She said the message needed to get out to teenagers that it was “a success” if you were 16, 17 or 18-years-old “and came to work at somewhere like Pret”.

“It takes a long time to change hearts and minds. We need to work with education, career services, with parents, to find ways to collaborate,” she said.

Her comments echoed those made by Kevin Green, the chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, at the Department for Work and Pensions select committee.

He revealed that a large food processing plant in the Midlands which made a concerted effort to hire large numbers of British workers to replace migrants had failed to make the cultural shift stick.

He said it held lots of roadshows, open days at the processing plant, but “one month on, 75% of UK nationals were no longer there”.

“What is that about? These are hard jobs, potentially physically demanding. I’m not sure we prepare people very well. They are paid national living wage. We need to work on attitudes to work, that’s a challenge for employers,” said Green.

Tim Martin, the founder of pub chain JD Wetherspoon and a vocal Brexit campaigner, said Britain could not afford to put the brake on immigration. He called for a special deal for EU workers which took advantage of its proximity compared with countries such as India and China.



“For the UK to be a successful country and economy in the next 20, 30, 50 years, we need a gradually rising population and that will need some type of reasonably controlled immigration. If we don’t get it I think the economy will tend to go backwards,” he said.