Non-UK workers vital for crop picking
We welcome immediate confirmation in the Home Office statement of the expansion of the pilot scheme to 10,000 seasonal worker permits for the 2020 season.
However, there is currently no commitment to extend the scheme beyond this year, which is a huge concern. Our British berry growers employ around 29,000 seasonal workers a year, the horticulture sector more than 70,000, 99 per cent of whom come from outside the UK.
Growers constantly try to recruit local workers and pay average wages well above the living wage but, by definition, a seasonal job is less attractive than a permanent one. Furthermore, farms are in rural areas where numbers of job seekers are low anyway, meaning we absolutely rely on non-UK workers for the short and medium term.
Effective commercial use of robotics and automation is many years away. And automation will only replace a proportion of manual workers as farm fields are very different to factory floors.
The current availability of 10,000 temporary visas for this year is a step in the right direction, but will not remotely fill the berry growers’ need for seasonal workers once EU workers are unable to access these jobs.
Nicholas Marston is chairman of British Summer Fruits
