Unite's push for Labour and Liberal Democrat peers appears to have paid off with the government putting the brakes on its plans to cut the pay of 150,000 rural workers on Wednesday.

It was a glimmer of hope in Unite's battle to save the Agricultural Wages Board (AWB), which regulates the pay for workers in England and Wales, after peers successfully intervened to delay a House of Lords vote on the AWB's future until the report stage in around six weeks time.

Unite national officer Julia Long said: 'We applaud the intervention of those peers that did not want a large swathe of the agricultural workforce reduced to poverty wages.

'The government has behaved in a shambolic way in tacking on an amendment that will have a huge impact on the rural economy onto a business bill - the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill.'

Long is confident that there is still time to gain enough parliamentary support to secure the future of the AWB.

Labour's shadow farming minister Huw Irranca-Davies is reported to have worked hard behind the scenes to delay the vote.

However many farming bodies have long argued that the AWB, which is the last of the wage councils set up after the second world war to regulate pay and conditions, is an outmoded model and needs to be abolished.