EXMOOR and West Somerset hospitality businesses have been plunged into a staff recruitment crisis – just as the area was preparing to welcome thousands of summer visitors, it was revealed this week.

It is estimated that the hospitality sector on Exmoor currently has more than 400 key vacancies and many businesses have already cut back on services due to staff shortages.

Pubs and hotels are urgently advertising for chefs and experienced kitchen staff, and report that they often receive no applicants, however tempting the wages and conditions.

Emma Thomasson, chief executive of tourist organisation Visit Exmoor, said: “Our businesses are amazing. They have been robust and adaptable all through the last year, and they will do all they can to rise to the staffing crisis, but the way the numbers have fallen is really dramatic.

“I don’t think the problems facing the Exmoor tourist industry have ever been quite so acute.”

She added: “We are seeing the delayed impact of the lack of European workers and some workers are still on furlough. Significant numbers of people have also decided to change their lifestyle and take on a different sort of work.”

She said an urgent need existed to encourage young people to train for the hospitality business and called for continuing government support for tourism and hospitality, including an extension to the VAT reduction scheme.

She said: “We are busy promoting what a wonderful place this is, not only to visit but also to live in and work. This is a fantastic area with fantastic businesses which are really concerned with the well-being of their staff.”

Ms Thomasson told the Free Press: “Businesses are having to adapt their product to the staff shortage – some hotels are providing meals only for paying guests or providing services which don’t need a chef.

“The tragedy is that there is a huge demand, particularly due to the restrictions on foreign travel, but sadly, in many cases, staff shortages are undermining that.”

Ellen and Billy Rowlinson, who took over the historic Cross Lane House hotel at Allerford in November, 2019, are currently without a chef and have been forced to stop taking reservations for their restaurant.

“It is really difficult – there just aren’t many people looking for jobs,” Mr Rowlinson said. “Coming out of Covid we thought we would have a really busy time ahead but it’s not going to be the summer we had hoped to have.

“On the other hand, we will focus on overnight guests and do everything we can to provide the best possible service during these difficult times.”

Voted the UK’s best wine bar 11 times in a row, Dulverton’s Woods Bar and Restaurant will be temporarily closing two days a week from the end of this month for the first time in 28 years due to the shortage of staff.

Owner Paddy Groves told the BBC they had been advertising for three key members of staff for two months but had no applications.

The trend has extended to Watchet where the Onion Collective, developers of the £7 million East Quay community and leisure centre, set to open later this year, have been disappointed by the number of candidates to fill key jobs in their restaurant.

These include up to £30,000 a year for a head chef and £22,000 for an assistant chef. An Onion Collective spokesperson said: “It is a challenging time for the catering industry and while there are still highly qualified people around, the numbers are not there.”

Butlin’s, in Minehead, which employs 900 people during the summer, is also having problems recruiting staff and currently has 300 vacancies. A spokesman said that as a result, restaurants at the holiday complex might only open at 60 or 70 per cent of capacity despite staff working long hours.

This week, local MP Ian Liddell-Grainger confirmed that scores of Exmoor and West Somerset tourism-related businesses were struggling to fill staff vacancies and many were having to cut back opening hours.

“The problem is attributed to thousands of former hospitality workers having migrated to other, and better-paid, sectors during the pandemic and to a drain of foreign workers back to the EU,” he said.

“Catering and hospitality have traditionally paid among the lowest wages of nearly any sector, partly because the available labour pool was always greater than the number of vacancies at any one time.

“Now that position has reversed and there are more vacant posts than workers. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation – without a full complement of staff, businesses cannot shift into top gear.

“And until they reach that state they are in no position to pay the kind of enhanced wage levels that are going to tempt workers back.

“It may well be that in the long term the Government will have to divert some of its support funding to creating and underwriting a system of proper, structured career training in hospitality such as exists in other countries.

“We need the kind of scheme which equips entrants to the sector with high levels of portable skills, enabling them to make significant contributions to the running of a business, rather than being classed as low-skilled and low-paid, and entitling them to enhanced levels of pay.

“Certainly I see no prospect of a large-scale drift back into the sector by people who have found elsewhere better paid jobs without the need to work unsocial hours.”