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Curry
Industry Needs Home Office Help Not Hindrance
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Keith
Best receives Bengali award and warns Government that it needs to
wake up to the legitimate demands of the curry industry: Home Office
inactivity and ineptitude will not do .
At the
Bangladesh Caterers Night (Radisson SAS Portman Hotel in London) on
15 June Keith Best, IAS Chief Executive, received the Bangladesh
Caterers Association's BCA Honour Award "in recognition of his
valuable contributions to the Bangladeshi Curry Industry in the
UK".
Keith Best
praised the curry industry for having transformed British culture:
"the British went to Bengal with guns and bullets and the
Bengalis returned with something far more enduring and life changing
- curry. Your contribution to the UK economy, culture and way of life
is enormous and irreversible" he said.
"It is a
pity that more people do not understand that. The Government must be
sensitive to the needs of this industry and allow caterers to recruit
those whom they require - Government should not interfere in the
legitimate needs of British businesses. Caterers have thousands of
vacancies for kitchen-porters which they cannot fill from within the
UK or EU - they need people who understand the workings and language
of a Bengali kitchen. This constitutes a real threat to the
continuance of curry restaurants throughout the UK.
"We
welcomed the Sectors Based Scheme to bring in low-skilled workers
from Bangladesh and other countries but it was doomed to fail in the
requirements the Government set. It has now been abolished. The
former Minister asked the BCA and I to come up with a new scheme and
we made our suggestions but nothing has been done. There is no
enthusiasm among Ministers and civil servants to address this urgent
issue. The new Tier 3 points based system for low-skilled workers
will not come into effect until February 2008 - the curry industry
cannot wait until then.
"We need
to remount the campaign to bring home to Ministers, MPs, press and
public the importance of this. It will be the British public which
suffers if restaurants go out of business because of the inactivity
and ineptitude of the Home Office."
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