Wages board sets out pay rise policy

The board has recommended that the Grade 1 agricultural minimum should rise by 2.4 per cent, from 5.81 an hour to 5.95 an hour. The minimum hourly pay for Grade 2 workers should increase by 2.8 per cent, from 6.40 an hour to 6.58. Other proposed new rates for a maximum 39-hour week are: Grade 3, 7.24; Grade 4, 7.76; Grade 5, 8.23; Grade 6, 8.88.

The NFU described the outcome as "challenging" and called on the new coalition government to abolish the board as soon as possible.

To do so was a Conservative manifesto promise, repeated since the election.

Commenting on this year's negotiations, NFU deputy president Meurig Raymond said: "We appreciate that the cost of living is rising for farm workers as it is for employers and that they face the additional prospect of a penny rise in their national insurance contributions. We also want to make sure that the farming industry is seen as a stable and fair-paying industry.

"The fact is that the sector has maintained employment levels whereas in most other parts of the economy they have fallen. Salaries must be market driven. The proposed award sits between inflation forecasts, yet exceeds current levels of average pay growth across the economy. We expressed real concern to the board about the pressures that many businesses are facing, particularly in the horticultural sector.

"The AWB is an industrial relations relic that has no place in modern society. It serves no other purpose than to add cost and complexity to farmers and growers.

"As an example of absurdity, a farming business may employ workers in a vegetable pack house at national minimum wage yet be forced to pay the same workers an extra two pence per hour for harvesting the crops. I am therefore calling on the coalition government to scrap the board at the earliest opportunity."

But the union side's chief negotiator, Ian Waddell of Unite, successor to the veteran Chris Kaufman, who has retired, said the government would have to clear up a lot of legal questions to make abolition possible and his union would fight all the way.

He could not see any way it could be done before this year's agreement was due to be ratified by the AWB, on July 23, and the agreement would then be binding from October 1, as far as he could see.

He commented: "Last time the AWB was threatened, under the Thatcher government, the NFU campaigned to retain it. You are talking about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people employed in ones and twos and threes and the prospect was of local wage negotiations with all of them by employers without much knowledge.

"The NFU now talks as if it is all about the minimum wage but we have a grading structure, we have a qualifications system, holidays, sick pay, all sorts of terms and conditions."

Defra declined to comment when asked how and when abolition of the AWB would be handled.