Grower groups have been urging the government for clarity on the future of the seasonal worker scheme after the prime minister and cabinet members appeared to be delivering mixed messages.
During her leadership campaign Liz Truss was reported as planning to allow more seasonal migrant labour into the UK, through reforms to the points-based immigration system and extension of the seasonal worker scheme for the coming year.
But in an interview on the Daily Telegraph’s politics podcast during the Conservative Party’s conference at the beginning of October, Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she ‘did not buy’ growers’ evidence that they were unable to recruit from the domestic labour force.
She said: “If we are to help them with migration we should make it incumbent on them to innovate, industrialise and use technology to reduce reliance on cheap foreign workers. We should be asking them to advertise more energetically locally. I don’t buy this line that British people don’t want to work in farming.”
This year 40,000 visas were made available through the seasonal worker scheme. In a written answer to a parliamentary question at the end of September Defra farming minister Mark Spencer said: “Under current agreement with the Home Office a similar number will be rolled forward for 2023. Defra is discussing with them precisely what the number will be, using evidence from the NFU and other stakeholders provided in 2022 and having regard to the prime minister’s stated support for a short-term expansion of the visa route.”
The case for expanding the seasonal worker scheme was pressed on Mr Spencer during an NFU fringe event at the Conservative Party conference by NFU horticulture board vice-chairman Derek Wilkinson. He said the scheme needs extending to a minimum of nine months.
Mr Spencer told him Defra was ‘in conversation’ with the Home Office. “This is not a promise to deliver extra numbers, but it’s certainly a promise to try,” he said. “I will do everything I can to convince the Home Office to give you that certainty.”
British Growers Association chief executive Jack Ward described the home secretary’s view as ‘fundamentally wrong’. “All the evidence of the past few years shows that,” he said.
“Don’t forget we do already have a three-year agreement with the government on seasonal labour and are expecting that to be kept.”
The Association of Labour Providers has launched an ‘extra workers needed’ portal on its website to match growers in need of additional seasonal workers with licensed labour providers who have people available. There is no cost for growers to register and use the portal but normal commercial terms will apply between labour providers and growers where any workers are supplied.