Farmers are running out of patience with what they see as government inaction over the future availability of seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers, the environment secretary has been told.
Michael Gove was confronted over the issue at the National Farmers’ Union annual conference, but told delegates that while he understood their plight he did not have the power to accede to their demands for a new deal for non-EU workers on temporary contracts on farms.
Ali Capper, who chairs the NFU’s horticulture team, told Gove that the availability of workers to pick fruit and vegetables was now “mission critical for 2018”.
Gove told her the NFU’s demand for clarity on labour was “powerfully and loudly” made but that the lead department in the matter was the Home Office, not his.
“It’s already the case that the supply of labour from EU27 countries is diminishing as their economies recover and grow. So, in the future, we will need to look further afield,” he added later, saying he had to abide by decisions in a collective government.
Capper welcomed Gove’s acknowledgement that labour shortages were now so great that farmers needed to go beyond the EU, but said time was running out.
“We just need action; without wanting to blaspheme, I’m sick of hearing ‘we understand the issue, we know you need access to non-EU and EU workers’,” she said.
Meurig Raymond, the outgoing NFU president, told Gove that this was a critical issue for farming, citing a recent Guardian report of a fruit farmer in Herefordshire moving part of his business to China because of Brexit.
The number of EU27 workers coming to Britain are declining, partly because of Brexit and the weaker pound, but also because of improvement in employment opportunities in eastern European countries such as Poland, from where many harvest workers came.
Farmers have been demanding a return to the seasonal agriculture workers scheme, which was scrapped in 2013, to allow the hiring of pickers from non-EU countries this summer.
Clapper said: “When we say we need action, we don’t want an announcement, we just want a scheme urgently for non-EU workers.
“Other countries get it; the Portuguese are hiring Thais, the Spanish are hiring Moroccans, even the Polish get it, they are hiring Ukrainians under their equivalent of seasonal agricultural schemes.
“It was good that he [Gove] acknowledged, we need access to non-EU workers, however our growing season comes in earnest in spring and we are running out of time,.”
Earlier this month data revealed that farmers were already hit by labour shortages with produce left to rot in the fields in 2017.
The NFU believes that if farmers could get access to between 10,000 and 20,000 workers, they would be able to plug the gap this year, particularly later in the season.