The NFU horticulture board has described Andrea Leadsom’s comments on seasonal labour as ‘naïve’ as it searches for a solution to an emerging shortfall in fresh produce workers.
Horticulture board chairman Ali Capper said there was “a naivity” about the Environment Secretary’s statement earlier in October that she hopes more young Brits will take up jobs and careers in food production.
Capper’s reaction comes as the NFU calls on governemnt to introduce an a trial seasonal workers scheme to fill an emerging post-Brexit shortfall in seasonal labour.
“To say we have people and waiting, ready to take these jobs is a fallacy,” Capper said. “Once unemployment goes below five per cent, we don’t really have unemployment in the country because most of the people who sit in that five per cent either can’t or won’t work.”
Other reasons that the NFU listed for why British workers are unwilling to take picking jobs included the fact that you have to live on or close to a farm in a rural location; you need to be prepared to move around to follow the jobs; and the benefit system does not allow workers to come off benefits, work and then go back to accessing them quickly or easily.
If the government could fix that system and put more flexibility into it, it might encourage more Brits to undertake seasonal labour, Capper suggested. But she stressed that she agrees with Leadsom’s sentiment when it comes to encouraging more young people to gain practical land-based skills.
“Our education system for the last two decades at least has failed children by making the only aspiration a degree,” she said. “There are children for whom a degree is just never a sensible, practical solution, but those children haven’t been given any other aspiration.
“If the government is going to rethink our education system – which it looks like it is – I would like the alternative to grammar schools to be technical schools where practical land-based skills are not only taught, but allowed to be aspired to again.
“In that sense I agree with Leadsom but that is going to take a fundamental shift in our education system and in the meantime we need seasonal labour.”
On the issue of immigration and permanent labour provision, Capper said the NFU will wait until the Home Office has decided what rules to put in place before lobbying government.
“On permanent jobs, it’s difficult to frame an ask of government because we’ve heard a number of different things,” she said. “We’ve heard that everybody is going to have to have a visa to come here. We’ve also heard that everybody who already has a job in advance will be able to come here. And we’ve heard that only people who are highly skilled will be able to come.
“It depends on what we’re given as to what we would ask for and, until we know that, we are trying not to enter that debate because it is about immigration.”
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