Here’s some good news – London has not only won the Olympic Games in 2012 but last month, it won the 2011 WorldSkills games – an Olympic-type event featuring a whole range of skills including, most importantly, cooking and restaurant service.

The aim of the games is to raise the profile and status of vocational skills, technicians and technical crafts to a wider audience.

The event, which has £11m of government support, is held every two years and will take place in October 2011, just before the Olympic Games. This fact alone makes London’s success in attracting both events all the more important.

Why? Because vocational skills are fundamental to the future of the hospitality industry. Without skilled chefs, waiters, receptionists, housekeepers and other similar craftsmen and women, the industry has a dire future.

Our current priority must be to put more effort into producing more vocationally trained people at a time when the government seems hell-bent on encouraging more and more onto university degree courses. Yes, we need the academically gifted; but, even more important, the industry needs a much, much larger stream of gifted young craftmen and women who can successfully perform on the world stage – because that’s the challenge Britain’s tourism industry increasingly has to meet.

We have come a long way in the last ten years. Britain’s current world-class chefs are almost all home-grown - talent that was trained and nurtured in Britain, despite the closure of many catering college courses because of their cost.

But what is needed now is to build on that success with much greater emphasis by the industry (and by the government) on vocational training. Without a highly skilled craft workforce, Britain will have difficulty in coping with the really big event in the following year – the Olympic Games.

It’s sobering to recognise that, by then, the industry will have needed to recruit well over 1m people to take account of retirement, staff turnover and expansion. Over half of these will need to be skilled chefs, waiters, front and back of house staff.

Some of these skills gaps are being plugged by overseas workers but, other countries in world tourism are also seeking them out, too. So Britain is in competition with other tourism destinations not only for attracting visitors to this country but for skilled workers. All the more reason therefore, to boost the capacity of our own vocational training. If we neglect to train the skilled craft people that we need tomorrow, the Olympic Games will not be the showcase of British talent that it ought to be.

Ironically, the announcement of London’s success came just at the time when BHA and the Restaurant Association were launching the 2006 Young Chef Young Waiter competition. This is specifically designed to encourage – and to honour – all those young people who are making such a success of their early career in two of the industry’s most important vocations. But we have a lot more encouraging to do to cope with the present – and future - skills gap.