Recruitment in UK pharma sector harder post-Brexit (Daily Telegraph)

John Rountree, Managing Partner at Novasecta, was today asked to provide commentary in an article in The Telegraph on the challenges of recruitment in the pharmaceutical sector following the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. John stated that “we’ve been hearing quite a lot of anecdotal evidence that [pharmaceutical executives are] not so much worried about the technicalities of labour restrictions, such as filling in visas, but about a general feeling among their peers that they are not very welcome in Britain. People are looking at their futures and saying: ‘Is this a country I will be welcome in and where I will raise my family?’ I have heard examples of people that have turned down jobs because of this kind of malaise.”

John goes on to say that “R&D is about brains, motivation and ambition of your people, so when more than 50pc of them are EU citizens, that clearly has an impact on productivity. All of the UK-based companies I spoke to said they were having to reassure employees that they are still important to the organisation. One senior person was in the middle of a decision cycle. The company was European and looking at its UK footprint in terms of R&D. It has originally considered expanding its development activities here, but it had become less attractive to do so and the company may well revert to building development capacity in its home country of Italy.”