Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme

Jo Churchill Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Helen Whately]

The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely good point. I am focusing my comments on pickers, because that is the most visible part of the supply chain in my constituency, but there are hundreds and thousands of workers involved in the whole supply chain—between the plant and the table, so to speak—including large numbers of packers, processors and all that. The whole supply chain is affected.

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. The issue is not only about processing in factories. In my constituency of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, a big farming area, up to 95% of factory workers are migrants. The issue is not only about fruit and veg, but about bacon and so on. Beyond that, the jobs cannot necessarily be done by my own constituents. I have only 635 at the moment who are looking for work. That is a big problem, too.

[Helen Whately]

My hon. Friend rightly refers to the large number of people working in the supply chain. Most of us—I know this is the case in my constituency—do not have many people looking for work.

Farmers have told me how their EU workers are genuinely worried at the moment about their legal rights to be in the UK. There are also concerns about their safety following reports of attacks on migrant workers. I hope the Minister will reiterate that the status of EU workers in the UK remains unchanged. It would be helpful to communicate that clearly to EU workers in the UK to make absolutely sure that they feel welcome and understand that legally they are allowed to remain and work in the UK while we are in the European Union.

The recent referendum result was decisive and, rightly, the Government plan to negotiate a Brexit deal that controls free movement. However, that creates a challenge for an industry that relies on seasonal migrant labour largely from the European Union. This is where the Government may be able to help. I want the Minister to look into piloting a new seasonal agricultural workers scheme, known as SAWS, for 2017, next year.

We used to have a seasonal agricultural workers scheme until 2013, as my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (Sir Henry Bellingham) has mentioned. Similar schemes exist in other OECD countries, including New Zealand, Canada, the US and Australia. Organisations from the NFU and the Fruit Advisory Services to the Migrant Advisory Committee agree that our old seasonal agricultural workers scheme worked well, as my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) mentioned. SAWS had robust entry and exit checks, which meant that more than 98% of those who came to work in the UK returned home when their work was complete. For that reason, those coming to Britain under SAWS did not count towards immigration figures. This debate on SAWS should not be seen as part of a wider debate on immigration. It is very much about the workforce for a specific sector.

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[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

As always, it is a pleasure to speak in this Chamber. I congratulate the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) for bringing forward this issue and for comprehensively setting the scene for us all to try to follow. My contribution will obviously be from a Northern Ireland perspective. My plea, like the hon. Lady’s, is for us to help our seasonal workers.

I hail from Strangford, and my constituency has some of the finest agricultural land in the entire United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I represent the home of the trademarked Comber spud, which is a treat to any palate across the United Kingdom. Nobody who has had a Comber spud will ever want any other kind of spud—I say that with great respect to Members who will probably make a plea for their own areas.

The land in Strangford is so fertile that we can sometimes have three harvests in a year, as opposed to the two that farmers in other areas of the Province have. We have some of the lowest levels of rainfall—I hope I do not tempt providence by saying that, but that is what the stats say and they have been accumulated over a number of years. That is wonderful news for our farmers, who struggle to make ends meet and put food on all our tables. However, as my mother used to say to me when disciplining me for misbehaving as a young boy, “You reap what you sow.” That is a solid principle. The harvest must come in or it is all for naught. If farmers do not have the labour to bring in the harvest, the result is clear: a waste of food and money. That is unconscionable.

[Jo Churchill]

Is not the point also that the industry is constantly pushing the boundaries of innovation and increasing productivity, thereby fulfilling what the Government are asking it to do by improving production and productivity? If we are not careful, we will constrain the one thing it really needs, which is a decent seasonal workforce.

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[Tom Tugendhat]

I completely agree. My hon. Friend knows very well that we share a passion for the British apple. As my right hon. and hon. Friends here will know, it is now russet season. May I strongly encourage those who have not had a Kentish Russet this season to do so? They are truly the champagne of apples—well, the English champagne of apples. They are the most fantastic product.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent said, we are talking about creating a system—I know the Minister is listening carefully and following the theme of this debate—that allows innovation in the agricultural sector to increase. As a boy in Kent, I did quite a lot of fruit picking, and I know that many other people did that too. My picking was not quite of the standard that my dear friend Marion Regan would require, as I was not packing for Wimbledon, which is where her strawberries go. We used to go as kids to a pick-your-own farm. Of course, we ate half the stuff before it got into the punnet.

Getting the system right would not mean some return to the halcyon days—which have not existed for a long time—of east-end Londoners going hop picking in the summer, because those east-end Londoners, thank God, now have very good jobs and spend their holidays all around the world. I am afraid that the idea that hop picking in Kent is an alternative to Ibiza is simply not credible for large swathes of people. Perhaps it is for some.

The change that we as a nation voted for on 23 June means that we have to reinvent ourselves and remember some old skills. Some of those skills are to do with imagination and creativity, which was the extraordinary thing about the seasonal agricultural workers scheme. Although other OECD countries copied the scheme, it was innovative when it came in. Indeed, extraordinarily, it almost—I do mean almost—still exists. It was last operated in 2013, which is only a few years ago. One of the many organisations that operated it, the Harvesting Opportunities Permit Scheme, or HOPS, stopped only then, and it still runs a recruitment agency for agricultural workers, so it could easily be brought back. We are not talking about a complete redesign; we are talking about switching back to a scheme that worked extremely well until only recently.

None of that will compensate for the many workers deciding not to come because they will take a 10% or 15% pay cut if they are paid in pounds but want to take their money back to parts of the world where they spend in euros, so a new scheme will not be a direct replacement. It will not simply turn on the tap immediately. We must recognise that there are still challenges for farmers, not just in Kent but around the country, but such a scheme will go some way to offering opportunities. If we look at the issue seriously, as I know the Minister will, we will create the flexible scheme that Britain needs, that farming needs and that many of our friends in Europe need.

We are of course about to enter—in some ways, we already have—the toughest negotiations the world has ever seen, on hundreds of lines of Government business, industry, migration and any number of other questions. Everything is to play for. As we started those negotiations, we must demonstrate our good will towards our European neighbours. Whatever people may think about the European Union, we are all friends with our European neighbours, and we must show them that we are open. We must show them again that we are believers in free trade. We created the rule of law and the system of international agreement—that system was created largely in the Chamber not far from here. If we remind them that openness is something that we feel we still share, and that we are not just willing but actually very happy for their young men and women to come and do a significantly better job than I ever did in Kent’s strawberry fields and take money home to enrich their own communities, that will go a little way—perhaps not far, but certainly a little way—to showing our good will to our European friends in particular, but also to people around the world. That would be an important gesture, not just for us but for them.

May I briefly sum up and ask the Minister a few questions, which I know he will be delighted to answer? Will he consider introducing a pilot scheme as soon as possible? I mentioned HOPS, which I am sure would be delighted to assist, should the Home Office be willing to engage with it. I am sure that he will not need to give reasons why he will not, so I shall skip over any explanation he might otherwise have given. Will he please collect data from that pilot scheme and share them with Members and groups such as the National Farmers Union, which has done a lot of work on this issue, and the Country Land and Business Association, which likewise has devoted an awful lot of energy to supporting not only the agricultural sector but all industry in rural areas? That would allow us to evaluate and, yes, to adjust. We do not pretend for a moment that the first scheme that will roll out will be perfect. It will not be, but we would be happy to work with him on that.

[Jo Churchill]

Does my hon. Friend agree that as the industry has been so proactive in asking us to have those discussions, it behoves the Government to involve the industry—the NFU, the CLA and so on—in developing the scheme that is most appropriate to service the issues that have come to light during this debate?

[Tom Tugendhat]

My hon. Friend makes an absolutely essential point. Not only does it behove the Government to consult the industry widely because of all the efforts it has made, but we simply will not get a very good answer unless we do that, because the experts are the people who are doing the work, not the ones who are legislating on it. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister will be only too willing to meet members of the NFU and the CLA. I remember his willingness to meet all manner of groups in his former occupation as aviation Minister, when he listened carefully to the people of west Kent and came up with absolutely the right answer. We will skip over that.

My last point is this. We have offered evidence that businesses will not survive if they rely solely on UK workers—a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent made extremely well. The farmers in my community need help now. I know that the Government, my hon. Friend the Minister and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural affairs are listening. I urge the Minister to act with a little alacrity, because as my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent said, the season for strawberries is not in June; it is in March.