I admit I am commenting from the perspective of employment in the utility and heavy industrial sector; I'm long out of touch with manufacturing.
In my sector we outsource a lot of work to small one-man-band consulting companies, guys who are of retirement age but are supplementing their pensions by continuing to work or who simply enjoy their work enough that they choose to work beyond retirement. Once that work would have been done in-house but today we lack the technical expertise to take it back in-house and it isn't causing a problem right now because the consultants will always be there, won't they? The small consultants have no incentive to pass on their knowledge, and indeed it would work against them. This consultant-based business model isn't sustainable in the long term and that is part of the reason why I think things will get worse before they get better.
Don't assume that house prices in the south-east are representative of the nicer part of the UK further north - you can certainly get a nice house up here on £80k a year, whereas it wouldn't go very far in Surrey or Kent. Not much I can do about the weather though. ;-)
While I'm not sure I have any real data to back it, conceptually I'm inclined to agree with Scotty about some sectors living on the glut of folks from the 70's & 80's etc. before some of the industries deregulated/downsized...
Frankly I have a feeling that is true here in the States let alone in the UK where selling of nationalized industries also plays into it.
At least at my employer in the US to get over not really training people up we instead just hire PhD's who did something vaguely related in grad school and have them muddle through. Most of the are H1B so get paid not much more (possibly less) than a bachelors with a couple of years relevant experience would anyway. I fear it may catch up with us in that having a PhD doesn't necessarily mean you have the more applied skills but we'll see.
Gaming the H1B system is hardly new; we were (shhhh!!) doing that at a previous company 35 years ago. We would simply list out all the oddball things that the engineer did into the job listing, and, of course, no one but the person in question met all the requirements, and so the H1B application was validated because there was indeed a lack of qualified home-grown personnel.
Even aside from H1B, I doubt that anyone has ever really had a problem dealing with something like a sole source justification to prove that the item you wanted was the only item in the universe that met your needs and requirements. There was a vendor that (in)famously circulated a "lock-out" specification to their customers so that they could justify going to that vendor and bypass certain government procurement regulations.
TTFN
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Of course I can. I can do anything. I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
