Seasonal Migrant Workers

Deidre Brock Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Commons Chamber

[John Lamont]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making that point. I would say that this debate is focused on the agricultural sector. There are definitely challenges in other parts of the economy, but that does not remove anything from the fact that in the past 10 years there has been a downward trend in the number of workers who are coming from the EU to work in our economy.

Seasonal work in the United Kingdom now appears less attractive than it was a decade ago because of a range of factors. A number of Members have described those, but the most notable is the drop in the value of the pound. Many voices in the industry favour the reintroduction of the seasonal agricultural workers scheme, which came to an end following the admission of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU. We now have the opportunity to bring this scheme back or at least to look at something similar—an opportunity that has only been brought about because of Brexit. I join in calls for the United Kingdom Government to look closely at reintroducing the scheme as a way of meeting the seasonal needs of farmers not just across Scotland and in my constituency, but across all the United Kingdom.

A final point I want to make is that this issue starkly highlights the importance of maintaining the United Kingdom’s internal market and the easy movement of staff across the UK—something that the Scottish National party Government in Edinburgh seems unable to understand. Seasonal migrant workers often start working in one part of the United Kingdom and travel across the country on different jobs in one season. The effect of the SNP’s call for a separate immigration policy would make it harder for workers to do that. As Jonnie Hall, the director of policy at the National Farmers Union Scotland said, the last thing that farmers need is a “checkpoint at Berwick”. As is often the case, the needs of the farming sector are the same north and south of the borders, and it is in the farmers’ interest that this is dealt with on a UK-wide basis, rather than on a Scottish-only basis.

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Christine Jardine]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Dydd gŵyl Dewi hapus to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to all here. Happy St David’s day—and happy first day of spring, just in case anybody did not notice. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate, and I commend the hon. Member for Angus (Kirstene Hair) for having secured it.

Many years ago—I suspect before some Members here were born—I worked for the Health and Safety Executive, based in Dundee, and I spent quite a lot of time around Angus and Perthshire visiting small local businesses. One thing that struck me then was that in addition to the significant direct employment in fruit growing and fruit processing in places such as Angus, Perthshire and Aberdeenshire, the number of small, family-owned businesses and other trades and professions that rely on agriculture is massive. There are mechanics, engineers, blacksmiths, lawyers, accountants, and haulage contractors, as well as the visible jobs, with people out working in the fields. Effectively, the whole economy of that part of Scotland is underpinned by our soft fruit and produce industry. That is why it is so important to protect it.

Scottish quality fruit and veg now adds £300 million a year to our GDP. It is 10% of our entire agriculture output—almost as much as the much more obvious Scottish farming industries of dairy and sheep farming, for example. Whatever happens with our relationship with the EU and others, I hope that those who rightly take massive pride in producing some of the best fresh fruit and veg in the world will continue to market it under Scotland, the brand, to draw attention to the fact that it is branded as being as good as anything people can get from anywhere else in the world.

I note that in a single year, one growers co-operative, actually based in Angus, reported a loss of income of £660,000, simply because of labour shortages in a single year. That is one co-operative of 18 growers that is not likely to be any different from a lot of others. This industry and this part of our economy is under severe stress and severe threat. As my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) pointed out, it is difficult this year, but if the Government do not act, and act very quickly, next year and the following year could become impossible. This has been an iconic part of Scottish culture for decades, if not centuries, but we could see an end to soft fruit growing in parts of Scotland. I will come on to the UK Government’s response to that potential threat later.

It was reported in The Guardian last summer that a survey by the NFU found that between January and May 2017, farmers in the UK recruited a total of 13,400 workers, 14 of whom were from the United Kingdom—not 14,000 or 1,400, or even 140, but 14 out of almost 13,500 came from the United Kingdom. Other speakers have commented on the complex reasons why it is simply not credible to expect overseas seasonal migrant workers to be replaced by home-grown workers any time in the next 10, 15 or 20 years, and perhaps never at all. The industry will not last that long if we cannot pick the fruit from the fields.

We also have to remember that as well as the potentially disastrous impact on parts of our agriculture sector, the Government’s attitude to immigration—they treat it as numbers to be dragged down at all costs—affects so many other things which, certainly in Scotland and many other parts of the United Kingdom, we should be proud of having built up over the years.

Relative to the size of its population, Scotland possibly has more of the world’s top universities than any other country. Part of the reason for that is the number of overseas students and the number of exceptionally talented and dedicated overseas staff, including research staff and lecturers, who have come here purely as a result of freedom of movement, and who no longer express an interest in coming because they are not sure what their rights will be.

The demands on our NHS and care services are obviously very much in our minds at this time. Those services also rely heavily on incoming workers. I hope that it is not stretching relevance, Madam Deputy Speaker, to give a special mention to a consultant surgeon in Glasgow who this morning walked for three hours in the snow to get to work in Paisley. That is the sort of dedication that we see among NHS workers, regardless of where they have come from.

According to the article from The Guardian that I mentioned earlier—written last year—the director of an employment agency called Hops Labour Solutions, which exists to bring in seasonal workers to support the UK agricultural sector, said:

“The grim reality is that the perception from overseas is we are xenophobic, we’re racist”.

We might take exception to those words—we might like to think that we are not xenophobic or racist—but if that is how we are perceived by even 10% of people who might have been thinking of coming to work in the United Kingdom, we have a problem. It is a sad but undeniable fact that one of the immediate impacts of the vote to leave in the referendum in June 2017 was a massive spike in racist and racially motivated crimes in many part of the UK. Thousands of EU nationals living in the UK have come before Select Committees and told us that they have experienced a significant increase in racially motivated attacks, that they have begun to feel that they are no longer welcome, and that friends who have thought about coming here have been made to feel that they might not be welcome either.

I am not saying that that was one of the Government’s intentions in calling the referendum, and I am certainly not saying that it was the intention of anything like all the 17 million people who voted to leave, but we must face up to the fact that, as one of the consequences of the referendum, a climate or undercurrent has been allowed to develop which makes people from the European Union feel less welcome and less valued than they were before. If the Government continue to ignore or deny that, the problem can only continue to get worse.

The hon. Member for Angus pointed out, very eloquently, that although some parts of our fruit and vegetable growing industry can be mechanised, others cannot at this stage, and it will be several years, if not longer, before that will be possible. Solutions that rely simply on significant investment and mechanism might work in some industries, but they certainly would not work for soft fruit growers.

When we debated the seasonal agricultural workers scheme last year, the then Minister gave an assurance that the scheme could be reintroduced within five to six months if necessary. I suggest that it is now necessary, and that the Government should be seeking to reintroduce the scheme within far less than five to six months if that is at all possible. They clearly accepted that there might be a need to change the bad decision that was made in 2013, and I suggest that the need has now been established.

[Deidre Brock]

At a recent Scottish Affairs Committee meeting in Fife, we heard the views of Jonnie Hall of NFU Scotland on that very issue. He told us how frustratingly difficult he found it to “get traction”, as he put it, with the Home Office to even meet and discuss the union’s suggested solutions for dealing with the looming crisis, including SAWS. Will my hon. Friend join me in calling on Home Office officials to meet representatives of NFUS and other experts in the sector as a matter of urgency to try to find a way out of this Brexit boorach?

[Peter Grant]

Absolutely, and I would extend that to many other areas of activity, whether in private sector industry or in our greatly stressed public services. Home Office officials need to get out of the office and meet the people who work in agriculture, the health and social care services and universities, and hear why their approach to immigration—whether it is immigration on a permanent basis or migration on a temporary basis—is simply wrong.