Farmers struggle to attract local labour

The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme is up for review but the NFU says it must continue to allow special-case migrants until more British citizens are prepared to take seasonal harvesting work.

Deputy president Meurig Raymond said on publication of the NFU report: “We recognise that the horticulture industry must do everything it can to maximise the potential of the resident workforce. We are proposing training initiatives and welfare benefit adjustments that will encourage currently inactive citizens into a job in the sector.”

Meanwhile, however, the report quotes a lot of testimony criticising British labour and some farmers saying they have gone off incomers from the so-called A8 countries from the 2004 expansion of the EU – Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Some farmers swear by them but some say recent A8 immigrants want agricultural work only as a stepping stone, and they prefer the Bulgarians and Romanians who come in on SAWS permits. Typical testimonies ...

Plant nursery, Yorkshire: “Seasonal UK workers have been impossible for us to source due to our rural location with low population and high property prices. We have used A8 nationals, but during 2010 and 2011 found approximately 80 per cent to be unreliable.”

Potato farmer, Norfolk: “I used to try to find grading staff via the Job Centre. Usually they contacted me simply to satisfy the requirement to be seen to be looking for work and nearly always the first thing they told me was that they had no transport. The last time I used UK labour, in 2000, I resorted to agreeing to take whoever the Job Centre could find and collecting them from a car park at 6.30am every morning.

“Out of the four workers sent to me, only one stayed the course.”

Fruit and swede grower, Perthshire: “Although we recruit a number of A8 workers, many of them do not stay and this causes huge problems in training expenses.”

Fruit grower, Kent: “We did place adverts for local labour in 2011 and received the massive response of ONE person when we require 250 people. In the previous season, we did source five locals all of which only stayed for about three days, before they quit, because ‘they were better off on the dole’.”

Fruit grower, Dorset: “Last autumn, we required a workforce of 20 for a five-week period. We placed the job vacancy with the Job Centre and put adverts in the local paper. We were contacted by over 60 people. Some were not willing to work for just above the minimum wage or were only interested if there was no official paper trail. Others felt that to come off benefits/allowances for a short period did not warrant the hassle. We ended up recruiting 15 local people although I do not think there was ever a day when more than seven or eight were here. Some only lasted one or two days. The average was 10.”

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