A Somerset grower found her farm was an inadvertent laboratory for government labour policy when she became one of the first growers to actually lose crops because of the unavailability of seasonal workers.

Dr Jan Butterley, who grows a mixture of strawberries and raspberries on her 45 acre farm outside Wellington, had to discard an early-season crop of strawberries amounting to roughly seven tonnes.

“Once we did have the workers, we still had to go through the fields and clear out the crop, which was fairly depressing,” she said.

Her chief troubles stemmed from the fact that, with the limits placed on SAWS, she was forced to source early-season pickers from EU countries.

“The problem was that my season starts in early May,” Dr Butterley explained. “Which is when the Polish universities are still in exam-time. When we had SAWS, it was much easier, because the Ukrainian and Russian universities tend to be far more modular: students can earn course credits for the work they do on British farms, or go back and write projects on it.”

For her, next year presents only further hurdles, as the system is clamped-down on even further, and only Romanian and Bulgarian workers become fully eligible.

“I like to run through with about 60 people from May onwards, and gradually wind down from there. Most people on our farm stay between four and six months. But now I know I’m going to have problems in the new season, but it’s impossible to do anything about it. I wish the government would actually engage with us a bit more on this. I’m not the only one who’s losing out.”

Restrictions will be applied to low-skilled migration from Romania and Bulgaria and be restricted to those sectors of the economy where the UK already has low-skilled schemes.

SAWS will move towards exclusively recruiting Romanian and Bulgarian nationals by January 1 2008. However the Home Office has put transitional arrangements for SAWS in place during 2007 in order to allow the SAWS operators to move from their current recruitment activities to activities solely in Romania and Bulgaria.

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