Housing crisis hurts hospitality staffing levels, sparks forum call

While many hospitality outlets are struggling with government COVID restrictions that lock out workers, Hotel Nicholas owners Ross and Lorraine Lucas said the main cause of the plight was a lack of rental accommodation.

Mrs Lucas has echoed Beechworth Bakery's call for the government to address the situation and wants to help organise a forum to work out solutions.

"We're calling for a forum to be held, a meeting involving people from the state and federal governments, local business operators and people who represent the workers who want jobs," she said.

"We need a big talk where people can sit down and work out ways to address these massive problems."

Mrs Lucas said the pub's diverse cuisine opened the doors to many hospitality workers from overseas, many from Asia.

She said the hotel employed Filipinos, Japanese, Nepalese and Thai staff but immigration red tape was a major hurdle.

"We are trying to get an Filipino chef on board who is perfectly qualified and keen to work but the hurdles to get that person here are ridiculous. And on the top of that - where will that person be able to live once they're finally established workwise if they can't find anywhere to live?"

She said the hotel often had to cancel functions involving more than 100 people because there was not enough staff to cope with big numbers.

Mr Lucas said people were now out and about but businesses needed staff to cater for them. "This housing issue was a problem before COVID hit," he said.

"We were very busy before then, but now that it's busy again, the housing problem has really hit hard in terms of staff trying to find somewhere to live. Beechworth has very little rental accommodation available, especially for people on lower incomes.

"The government says we have to create jobs. The jobs are there but we can't attract people from out of town to work here [in Beechworth] because there's nowhere for them to live."

Mr Lucas said "sometimes we've had shut for a whole day because we just don't enough people to run it".

"Even after Covid died down and was bad for business, we're now faced with this problem," he said. "This pub opened in 1870 so we're quite a historic attraction and have no problem drawing people in."

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: