Wetherspoons boss Tim Martin backtracks on ‘out of context’ immigration comments

"America, Australia and Singapore have benefited for many decades from this approach. Immigration combined with democracy works." But Martin told the BBC that these comments were out of context and that in some towns, jobs at Wetherspoons pubs were in fact oversubscribed. There is no doubt though that the hospitality sector is facing an issue of staff shortage though after the struggles of the past 15 months. Over the past year, Wetherspoons has reduced staff at its 871 pubs by 6,000 to almost 38,000. Meanwhile figures from the Office for National Statistics in April suggest that more than one in 10 hospitality workers in the country left the sector in the last year. Industry body UK Hospitality has urged the government to encourage UK-based workers to join the hospitality sector, and have said that there is a shortfall of about 188,000 workers due to successive lockdowns.