Food and Farming: Employment Opportunities

George Eustice Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) on securing the debate, which gives us an opportunity to recognise the importance of the food, farming and fisheries sector, which, let us not forget, employs about one in seven of all workers in this country.

I should declare an interest, in that I, as some of my colleagues know, studied agriculture. I attended Writtle Agricultural College in the early ’90s and studied for a higher national diploma in commercial horticulture. I also did a number of other courses through the local further education college that was mentioned earlier—Cornwall College, down in Camborne in my constituency—which offered some very good work in this area. Also in my constituency I have Duchy College, which is linked to Cornwall College and is one of the country’s leading agricultural colleges. This is an issue that I am passionate about because it is an issue I chose to study myself.

The food, farming and fisheries sector provides a huge variety of career opportunities, including many requiring skills in science, technology, engineering and maths—STEM. Food manufacturing is the biggest manufacturing sector in this country, as other hon. Members have pointed out. It employs about 400,000 people and provides about one sixth of the UK’s total manufacturing gross value added. In its 2016 productivity report, the Food and Drink Federation estimated that 130,000 jobs would need to be filled between 2014 and 2024, with food engineers and scientists particularly in demand. Clearly, therefore, there are great opportunities in the food manufacturing sector for today’s talented young people to build their careers.

Agricultural technologies are also transforming farming, creating new types of jobs needing new kinds of skills. Successful modern farming requires technical proficiency, business acumen and entrepreneurial skills. For example, I recently met a group of Tesco young farmers who were investing in developing their business, leadership and management skills and their understanding of the wider supply chain issues, while balancing busy jobs on poultry, dairy, arable and sheep farms.

The food and farming sector is also important to our nation as an industry that has a presence right across the country. It is interesting that we have had contributions from the far south-west—St Ives—and from Midlothian at the other end of the country about the importance of the sector to those areas.

[Sir Greg Knight]

And Yorkshire.

[George Eustice]

And, let us not forget, Yorkshire. The sector is a particularly significant employer in Cornwall; indeed, I have a number of important food manufacturing businesses in clotted cream and fisheries in my own constituency. Farming alone employs about 64,000 people in the south-west, and the Food From Cornwall website lists more than 330 businesses producing quality Cornish food and drink. Cornwall is, of course, famous for Cornish clotted cream and Cornish pasties, but also for Cornish sardines, or pilchards, and Fal oysters.

Sardines and oysters lead me on to another sector that is important in parts of Cornwall, including, of course, in Newlyn in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives. The UK seafood industry offers a wide variety of careers, including in fishing, aquaculture, processing, retail and food service. There can be no doubt, therefore, that across the food, farming and fisheries sector there are fantastic opportunities for our young people to build exciting, challenging and successful careers.

I want to talk a little about the industrial strategy and the post-16 skills plan. To secure the skilled workforce that the food, farming and fisheries sector needs for the future, Government and industry must work in partnership to prioritise training and skills. It is crucial that there are clear entry routes into the sector to help young people embark on their careers, and that employers invest in recruiting, training and developing their staff. The Government have introduced a number of policies on skills. The industrial strategy Green Paper, published in January this year, includes skills as one of its core pillars and has a particular focus on STEM. The post-16 skills plan, published in July 2016, aims to reform technical education by introducing 15 routes, or T-levels. These will include agriculture, environmental and animal care; engineering and manufacturing, which will include food manufacturing; and catering and hospitality. T-levels will provide technical education to equip students for skilled occupations, creating clear routes into the sector.

Reforms to apprenticeships will create fresh opportunities for people to develop new skills and progress their careers. The apprenticeship levy, which came into force this month, provides a new incentive for employers to invest in training. Many employers in the sector are rising to the challenge, and the number of apprenticeship starts in agriculture, horticulture and food manufacturing increased by more than 20% in 2015-16 compared with the previous year.

The Department for Education is exploring options to allow up to 10% of apprenticeship funds to be transferred down the supply chain from 2018, bringing the benefits of apprenticeships to even more businesses. We were keen to promote that idea in DEFRA because it means small farm enterprises within a supply chain could find it easier to benefit from the apprenticeship levy.

Apprenticeships provide great opportunities both to train new entrants and to upskill and develop existing members of staff. I am delighted that exciting new apprenticeship standards for butcher, advanced dairy technician, and food and drink maintenance engineer have now been approved for delivery. Many more are currently in development.

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

The sharing of the apprenticeship levy down the line is welcome, although I have one point. In Suffolk, a lot of the businesses involved in the sector are small and medium-sized businesses. What will the Minister do to ensure that the discussions he has on T-levels and maintaining quality are not dominated by the larger sector, and that small and medium-sized enterprises that need the staff have their input?

[George Eustice]

That is an important point. We have experienced people from the food sector involved in the development of the new apprenticeships. The idea that I had came when I visited a McCain factory, which manufactures chips from potatoes. It was clear to me that it had a well-resourced and well-managed apprenticeship programme within McCain, but there are 300 potato farmers in its supply chain. In most cases, those farmers do not have a human resources director to take care and look after an apprenticeship programme professionally. There was an opportunity to use the organisation and the skill sets that companies such as McCain have to foster apprenticeships on farms in Norfolk and Suffolk and wherever potatoes are grown.

I have been privileged to meet apprentices as the Minister responsible for agriculture, fisheries and food at DEFRA, and I know what great careers can begin from an apprenticeship. For example, I recently spoke alongside a former apprentice at a Feeding Britain’s Future event for unemployed young people interested in careers in food and farming. The young man had decided to do a mechanical engineering apprenticeship instead of following a conventional university degree, and after four years of training was earning more than £40,000 a year. Apprenticeships are a brilliant alternative to university because they allow apprentices to earn while they learn. New apprenticeship standards are being developed at degree level. Apprenticeships provide fantastic learning opportunities by allowing apprentices to develop their new skills on the job.

Employers benefit from apprentices. It has been calculated that the average person who completes their apprenticeship increases business productivity by around £214 a week through increased profits and productivity, and better-quality products. Small employers provide fantastic opportunities for people to get on the career ladder. Some 96% of the food manufacturing sector are SMEs, which can also benefit from hiring apprentices. SMEs have to pay only 10% of the costs of training their apprentices—the Government pay the remaining 90%.

[Dr Poulter]

The Minister is making an excellent case for the steps that the Government are taking to promote apprenticeships in the agricultural sector. Given the fact that many people decide on where their careers will take them at a relatively early age—it is probably around age 13 or 14—what steps can be taken to encourage younger people to think about careers in agriculture and the whole supply chain, and what work is he doing with schools?

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives also made that important point, which I intend to cover later in my contribution.

The Institute for Apprenticeships began work on new apprenticeships this month and will in time oversee the development of both T-levels and apprenticeships, helping to drive up standards and ensure quality. I am delighted that two members of the board, Dame Fiona Kendrick of Nestlé and Paul Cadman from Walter Smith Fine Foods, bring expert knowledge of the food sector.

Finally, it is important to recognise that we must have continuous career progression once people are in the industry. The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board runs a series of activities to boost farm competitiveness and sustainability, including farmer-to-farmer learning through business improvement groups and demonstration farms, so that there can be a sharing of expertise through open meetings, digital tools and knowledge exchange publications. Of course, there will be international benchmarking to learn from the experiences of other countries.

The Landex colleges last year came together to launch a new national college in agriculture, to thread together some of the activities that all of the Landex colleges are engaged in, and to try to secure the progression of more people towards level 3 qualifications, again with the aim of continuous professional career development.

My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives mentioned the image of the industry and the work being done to encourage more young people to go into it. Clearly, there are opportunities in the food, farming and fisheries sector, so we should encourage more young people to explore the sector when they think about their future. Overall, we currently have the highest employment rate—74.6%—since comparable records began, and youth unemployment has been falling, but it remains important to ensure that young people are able to make a smooth transition into the labour market, and that they consider the full range of options available as they prepare to launch their careers.

Careers in food and farming are too frequently perceived as low-paid, low-skilled and lacking in career progression opportunities. We need to challenge some of the outdated myths and champion the great careers that the sector offers. Across the country, engineers, scientists and technicians are at the cutting edge of innovation in agri-tech and food production. Industry-supported organisations such as Bright Crop, which my hon. Friend mentioned, IGD and the National Skills Academy for Food & Drink are working to tackle misconceptions and increase awareness of careers in the sector through initiatives such as Tasty Careers and Feeding Britain’s Future, which is run by IGD, and “The World is Your Oyster”, a campaign run by Seafish. All of those projects highlight the varied career paths that the seafood industry has to offer and the unique opportunities it can provide.

We are highlighting some of the superb apprentices already working in the industry, including by featuring them in the Government’s “Get In Go Far” careers campaign. In February this year, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs hosted a roundtable, bringing together a range of organisations to start a dialogue about what more industry and the Government can do together to champion the fantastic employment opportunities available in the food and farming sector. The roundtable heard directly from apprentices working in two leading food businesses—Nestlé and Mondeléz—about their experiences in the sector. The best people to sell the sector are often the young people who are starting out on their own careers in the industry.

[Mary Glindon]

The Minister is setting out some fine examples of what is happening, but may I press him on the industry’s need for seasonal workers? We want young people to get into the long-term jobs that he talks about, which is really important and probably the basis of the debate today, but there will be a continual need for seasonal workers. Without the seasonal agricultural workers scheme, how can we perpetuate our agricultural industry?

[George Eustice]

I shall return to that point—the hon. Lady also made it in her speech—as we have some time available, but the debate is predominantly about careers in agriculture and I wanted to focus on how to encourage more young people into those careers.

A number of hon. Members mentioned women in farming. I spoke at a “Ladies in Agriculture” event at the Farmers Club a couple of years ago—the former Secretary of State, the current Lord Chancellor, has also addressed that event. I mentioned a Tesco young farmers group earlier. Four of the 10 farmers in the group I met were women, so I believe we are making progress. It is essential not to overlook the great contribution that women can make, particularly when they are doing increasingly well in areas such as science. Many countries face the same challenge. Indeed, when I attended the G7 in Japan last year, one of their areas of focus was how to encourage more women into farming. Some of their ideas probably would not cut it over here—it was thought that a demonstration of a tractor with pink patterns on the side of the bonnet might help. I am not sure that would work here, but getting more women engaged in farming is a challenge for a lot of countries.

My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives mentioned the importance of encouraging school-age children to consider farming. The current school food plan actively encourages all schools to give children of primary school age an experience on a farm, so that they can see how food is produced. A number of the county show associations also run good projects. The Royal Cornwall Agricultural Association runs an event every year. It invites schools from across the county to come and learn about farming and farming careers. The Devon County Agricultural Association has as usual copied Cornwall and is running a similar project, which is great. We need as many areas as possible to promote farming as a career in schools.

The hon. Member for Midlothian (Owen Thompson) talked about the importance of farming and fishing north of the border, in Scotland. I regularly visit Scotland, particularly in connection with the fishing industry. I remember a visit to the Shetland Islands last year, where there is one of the key training academies for skippers and captains of fishing vessels. He mentioned the average age of farmers, which is another long-standing problem faced by many countries. The statistics often mask the reality, which is that the father is reluctant to let go of the purse strings but the actual manager of the holding is in the next generation down. Nevertheless, we are keen to do more to encourage more new entrants. There have been a number of projects, including some in Wales and some in Scotland. In Cornwall, the “Fresh Start” initiative worked on helping people to retire and creating opportunities for new entrants.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned that, because of Brexit, it is an uncertain world. Brexit is a fantastic opportunity. I take a glass-half-full view of it. We have a great opportunity to design an agriculture policy that is better suited to all parts of the UK. Last week, I had a meeting with NFU Scotland to talk about some of its thoughts and ideas about how we could deal differently with policy in future. One thing of which I can assure him is that I have yet to find a fisherman in Scotland who would like us to rejoin the common fisheries policy having left it. The fishing industry almost universally believes that the decision to leave the EU was the right one, and relishes the opportunities that that brings to the Scottish fishing fleet.

The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mary Glindon), and indeed the hon. Member for Midlothian, mentioned labour. As the hon. Lady will know, the Prime Minister has made it clear that she wants to respect the rights of EU citizens who are here working in the UK. She made that point early on, soon after the decision to leave the EU, and also made the perfectly reasonable point that obviously we would expect that to be reciprocated, which is not controversial. She has also made it clear that she hopes the matter can be settled early in the negotiations. I believe we can give that reassurance to those living and working in the UK now.

The hon. Lady asked about seasonal labour. Having a controlled migration policy and ending the presumption of free movement does not mean pulling up the drawbridge and stopping all immigration. It simply means what it says—having control of migration. It would be for a future Government to decide what work permits they wanted to grant, and whether they should be short-term permits or permits for more skilled people. That could be done based on an assessment of our needs. If there is a need for seasonal agricultural labour, a future Government will have at their disposal the ability to grant the types of permit that would be needed. All those issues can be dealt with.

This was an important debate on an important subject that is dear to my heart. We have made good progress with our work on apprenticeships, and we have done some great work in schools to promote agriculture and food careers. There is further to go, but I believe we have made a good start.