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Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots, the spectators' daily politics podcast.

I'm Natasha Froze and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and Kate Andrews.

Last week, Lord Wolfson, the boss of next and Brexiteer said that the government needs to allow more foreign workers into the UK to solve the labour shortages.

Is he right?

Fraser Nelson wrote in his column for the telegraph this week that he is not right, whereas Kate Andrews agrees with him.

They both join me now.

Kate, for those who didn't get to read your column in the telegraph, does Lord Wolfson have a point?

Absolutely, thanks Natasha.

I've basically said that what Lord Wolfson said in his interview to the BBC, which is essentially that Britain is in desperate need of workers who will fill in the gaps in the labour market,

is not only correct, but I think he's right to point to the fact that the crackdown on low-skilled immigration to come to the UK has proved a problem.

The comments of Lord Wolfson were made by lots of business leaders across the sector at the start of 2020 when the government was redrafting its immigration laws ahead of its formal exit from the European Union.

And at the time, the former home secretary, Pretty Patel, basically came back and said, well, that's just too bad.

Do more, pay the native workers more, invest in them more, upskill them more, you're just going to have to bear the brunt of this.

I think what we have now, though, is almost three years of evidence that, well, what Pretty Patel said was, I think, politically very savvy.

And there is absolutely no doubting that the decade previous of stagnant wages and low investment in workers has really been unfair and hurt British native workers.

That our record high vacancies are, in part, due to the fact that we have cut off any pathway for low-skilled migrants to come to the UK that have for a very long time now been a vital part of this economy.

And I don't believe that there is evidence to suggest that their role in the economy has been hurting native workers. If anything, there's a lot of global evidence to suggest otherwise.

And maybe we can come to some of the details of that, but I don't want to pit native British workers and low-skilled foreign workers against each other.

That is not how we're going to get out of this inflation-driven mess that we're in now, Fraser.

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