Leaving the EU: the Rural Economy

Matt Warman Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

I have said many times in this House that my constituency voted more than any other to leave the European Union, but what has not been said in this debate is that it was the rural parts of England and Wales that particularly voted to take back control. Those are the parts of the country for whom democracy today is working. What the rural UK voted for, it is getting. For those who remain remainers—behind the times though that may be—it is appropriate first to ask what rural Britain voted for. I would say that there are three things.

First, even though we know that agriculture has long been powered to a greater or lesser extent by migrant workers from elsewhere in the UK or from eastern Europe, a desire for a migration policy that has the consent of the British people was a key factor. By some estimates, a third of central Boston’s population is now from eastern Europe. These are hard-working men and women in the main, paying taxes and working in all weathers, but that is not a change the then Labour Government planned for or the constituency ever voted for.

A key impact of voting to leave the EU should not be to make any individual feel unwelcome, as I have said in this House many times; it should be the restoration, partly in the rural economy, of simple self-determination over environmental regulation and the workforce. No party went to the country on a manifesto that said that market towns across the east of England would see huge changes in numbers that would result in serious pressures on public services, and if they had, they might not have won.

So, on immigration, which is a key issue in my constituency, I hope one impact of Brexit will be the restoration of some form of the seasonal work visa scheme we had until relatively recently that means that people are able to come here, pay taxes and work if a job is already lined up.

Secondly, we should point out that there has already been an impact on the supply of labour in constituencies such as mine. In my area, there is already not the abundance of minimum-wage labour there once was. I submit that that will combine with the more than laudable impact of the national living wage to create a third condition, which, I suspect, will be a renewed push for further mechanisation and automation.

As the labour supply changes, and as technology gets more powerful, the Brussels sprouts and the brassicas in my constituency will, if hon. Members will forgive me, become guinea pigs for new research into how we make growing and picking them even more affordable for businesses that often work on ferociously tight margins, thanks in part to our supermarkets. We will see a rise of the rural robots. In that increasingly complex environment, we must guard against the challenges of modern slavery, but we must also bear it in mind that we have a huge potential to seize that industrial revolution and to take back the control my constituents voted for.