Mark Leftly (Curry house owners call for new visa rules to end chef crisis, 23 April) is right to highlight the need for British curry houses to recruit more chefs lest this now essential part of our gastronomic landscape fades away. But he is entirely wrong to support specialist visa arrangements to do so. Such a proposal enables the trade and the wider Asian communities to ignore their own responsibilities on three counts. First, after having Asian restaurants in the UK for 50 years there should be a well-developed apprenticeship model of training organised and funded by those who have built successful businesses here. This is a massive sector of the catering business in this country. Why aren’t the restaurant owners taking responsibility for their own development and recruitment of staff? Second, why is there a problem recruiting young people into this business but not into other spheres of work such as IT, medicine, dentistry, accountancy, pharmacy? Is it that working in a restaurant is too unattractive? Third, there is a substantial supply of highly qualified chefs in the UK already – the women who cook for their families every day. From my experience of visiting Pakistani families they are excellent at the job, have easily transferable skills and could be recruited immediately to solve this shortfall. Why are they not encouraged to move into the workplace?
Tim Evans
Lancaster
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