Tom Brake
Main Page: Tom Brake (Liberal Democrat - Carshalton and Wallington)Department Debates - View all Tom Brake's debates with the Home Office
(6 years, 8 months ago)
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Kirstene Hair
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. It is incredibly important that we look into automation, but I do not see how the soft fruit sector could adapt to full automation; there will always be a degree of manual labour.
About 80,000 men and women currently make the journey across to the UK to take part in this process. It is estimated that by 2019 this figure will rise to 95,000, due to the expansion of many farms, as well as the elongated season that arises from the innovative farming techniques we now see. Make no mistake: this is seasonal work and there is no need for pickers all year round. They are required for the preparation, planting and, in higher numbers, the harvesting. Precision is key; there can be no delays in farming. Being too late or too early has catastrophic effects on the quality and subsequent price—
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
The hon. Lady mentioned the duration of the season, but how long does she think that duration is? It has been put to me that because of polytunnels the season can be as long as nine months.
Kirstene Hair
I would agree with what the right hon. Gentleman says; the National Farmers Union Scotland’s recent report “CHANGE” suggests a season of up to 10 months, but I would say the nine to 10-month period would cover the harvest of soft fruit and of other sectors.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to see you in your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to this important debate and the hon. Member for Angus (Kirstene Hair) for leading it with an excellent speech. This debate could not have come at a more critical time for British farmers. Despite the weather outside, summer and the harvest season will be upon us before we know it. I am glad to have been able to co-sponsor the application as another vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for fruit and vegetable farmers.
We have already heard how important migrant labour is to our farming sector. That is true all year round, not just for seasonal work. It is true right across the supply chain—not just in picking, but in packaging and processing, right through to the retail and hospitality sectors. Migrant labour is important not just in low-skilled work, but in highly skilled jobs such as food scientists and vets, which I will mention again later.
Migrant workers have made a huge contribution to the British economy. The whole rhetoric during the Brexit campaign about their being a drain on local resources was not matched by the figures. They have a lower than average use of the NHS, use local shops and put money into the local economy. As we are hearing today, they will be much missed when they are no longer welcome on these shores. The debate today is about seasonal migrant labour, which is where the most pressing problem lies. This is not just a far-off problem that we need to deal with in the distant, post-Brexit, post-transition period future. The shortage in seasonal workers is happening now.
There are already alarming reports that food is rotting in British farms as there is simply no one available to harvest it. In total last year, something like 4,300 jobs were left unfilled. One farm in Scotland had to leave up to 100 tonnes of blueberries at a cost of £500,000. Another farm in Kent could not find workers to pick 2,000 tonnes of raspberries, costing it £700,000. Although demand for British fruit and veg has risen drastically—demand for strawberries alone rose by 180% from 1997 to 2015—the ability to source migrant workers has fallen. In September 2017, a huge 29% shortage was identified, and there are reports that the 2018 harvest has already been written off by many farmers. At a recent meeting of the APPG, which the farming Minister attended, we heard from a farmer in Kent—I think it was the same farmer who had lost £700,000—that he was already incurring significant losses due to a shortage of labour. He was talking about moving a substantial part of his business to Spain, which is clearly not what we want to happen.
Besides the obvious problem with food waste and inefficiencies, these rotting harvests jeopardise the already thin profit margins of British farmers, putting their entire businesses at risk. There is also the risk of cutting off the ongoing supply of quality British food getting to our supermarkets, as well as the tarnishing of the British brand abroad if we are unable even to get our own food out of the ground. As we have heard, the truth is that it is becoming far more difficult to attract workers.
In recent years, agriculture has become so heavily reliant on workers from eastern Europe, particularly the recent EU accession countries. Statistics show that migrants make up about 20% of regular full-time staff in the agriculture sector, with the majority coming from Romania and Bulgaria. According to estimates from the Association of Labour Providers, 90% to 95% of seasonal agricultural workers are from other EU countries. But as people from these countries now have the right to work and settle in the EU, they are looking not for seasonal work, but for permanent, better paid jobs often in towns and cities, rather than in rural areas. They want to be in places where they can bring their families with them, with better schools and local opportunities for family members to get jobs—places where they can make a life. We saw this first with Polish workers. We have heard from farmers that, going back a few years, perhaps 90% of their labour force were from Poland. That has very much disappeared, as those workers have been replaced by people from the newer accession countries—the Romanians and Bulgarians. However, these new workers are now following the Polish workers into permanent jobs in the towns and cities.
Pay and conditions for agricultural work are not attractive, certainly not enough to attract British workers and increasingly not enough to attract migrant workers either. Accommodation in rural areas is expensive and, if provided by employers, it is often very basic at best. In some cases, it is far worse than that. Unite the union has done some excellent work highlighting some of those concerns in its excellent report, “From Plough to Plate”. We also hear stories about the role of gangmasters and even human trafficking in the food and agriculture sector.
The labour shortage is real. It is an immediate threat. I am not being alarmist and neither are other Members who are raising these concerns. The Government urgently need to address the issue. This was recognised by the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, on which I sit. Last year, we conducted an inquiry into labour constraints and published our report in April, just before the election disrupted everything. We took evidence from a Home Office Minister and a DEFRA Minister, and we felt that there was a huge degree of complacency from the Ministers that the issue was something that we could muddle through, that it would all be fine and that we did not need an urgent response. Our report concluded that:
“We do not share the confidence of the Government that the sector does not have a problem: on the contrary, evidence submitted to this inquiry suggests the current problem is in danger of becoming a crisis if urgent measures are not taken”.
We also had real concerns about the lack of empirical evidence on which the Government based their decisions; they were using flawed statistics. In another of the Committee’s recommendations, we stated:
“We are concerned that the industry has such different experiences to those reported by the Government”.
In other words, the Government were not listening to experiences directly from people working in and running businesses in the sector. We continued:
“It is apparent that the statistics used by the Government are unable to provide a proper indication of agriculture’s labour needs. These statistics and their utility for measuring supply of, and demand for, seasonal labour must be reviewed by the end of 2017 to give the sector confidence in the adequacy of the official data on which employment and immigration policies will be based for the period after the UK leaves the EU.”
It is an understatement to say that the Government’s response, which came out in October last year, was weak. It showed shocking complacency. The Government chose to reject the hard facts and data that had been presented to the Committee by the sector, and failed to acknowledge that their own statistics were not fit for the purpose of measuring seasonal labour in specific sectors.
The strong feeling that I had during these discussions in the Select Committee and the APPG was that an ideological fervour for Brexit among certain Ministers—and, with that, unbending support for stringent curbs on freedom of movement—had completely overridden any common-sense approach to this problem. The response was very much, “We voted for Brexit. We voted to stop freedom of movement. That is our approach, no matter what evidence we have that this is going to harm the British economy.” I have heard that the then tourism Minister—the current Economic Secretary to the Treasury, the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen)—took a very different approach. When he was in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, he went in to bat with the Home Office for the tourism sector, saying that hospitality absolutely needs some flexibility to bring in migrant workers. That approach was not replicated by the farming Minister, which is one of the reasons why we are where we are now.
It was very welcome that the Environment Secretary made positive noises about reintroducing the seasonal agricultural workers scheme in his recent speech to the NFU. That scheme was scrapped in 2013 on evidence that we did not need it because we had workers from accession countries—the Romanians and Bulgarians. However, that is now no longer the case. It is worrying that we are only now starting to talk about the possibility of reintroducing SAWS; it would be far too late to get such a scheme in place for this year’s harvest.
However, I am not convinced that reintroducing SAWS would, in itself, solve the problem. As I have said, many people who would previously have done such work simply do not want to do it, and do not need to do it, any more. The exchange rate, the uncertainty following the Brexit referendum, the feeling that they are not welcome here, and even the British weather all mean that working elsewhere in the EU is a more attractive prospect. As we have heard, the economic situation in their own countries has improved to the extent that perhaps they do not need to come over here. Certainly, the poor exchange rate means that the financial benefits of doing so are much less, and taking home money with which they can afford to pay for things in their own countries is not such a pull. Even countries such as Poland cannot get workers; it is looking to Ukraine, for example, for people to do its agricultural work.
I do not see how far we can carry on with this chasing after cheaper labour, looking ever further afield. A year or two ago, I was on a flight from Stansted to Moldova that was full of Romanian workers who had clearly been hopping on budget flights, coming over here to work, and going back to their families at the weekend. If we are looking further afield, budget flights on easyJet are not going to bring in workers from Vietnam or Cambodia for £30 a time.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately). I suspect that we know some of the same farmers and they are quite complimentary about how she represents them on this issue. I hope, however, that she will rediscover her inner remainer and join us in a campaign to stay in the European Union, because the farmers in Kent to whom I have spoken would certainly like us to do exactly that.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Angus (Kirstene Hair) on securing the debate. She and others have given us all an opportunity to reminisce on the strawberry or raspberry picking that we did in our youth. I picked strawberries in France for 50 hours a week, at 10 francs an hour. I can confirm that after my first day of strawberry picking, I was sick as well, and that I dreamed of picking strawberries throughout the rest of the month, because that was what I was doing. I can also confirm that the explosive capacity of a raspberry is much greater than that of a strawberry and that, on impact, a raspberry makes a bigger stain.
My speech will be based mainly on my knowledge through family who are farmers in Kent. Their experience is that there has already been a significant downturn in the number of workers coming from places such as Bulgaria and Romania. That is happening for a number of reasons, one of which is that the value of the pound has dropped, thereby reducing their remittances. Their own economies are also growing strongly, in part as a result of their membership of the European Union. Although Members of this House are occasionally reluctant to talk about the benefits of the EU, I suspect that it has played a significant part in the economies of Bulgaria and Romania. Given their growing economies, I am concerned that the process of Brexit is making it harder for the UK to export to the very markets that we have helped create through supporting those countries’ membership of the European Union.
I am told that the workers who are coming now are older and less well educated, so it is no longer the students who are coming, but an older section of the population who, unlike the students, often do not speak English. Those students came partly because they wanted to practise their English and earn some money, but also because they wanted to consider staying in the UK for the longer term. Clearly, that is now of less interest to them, because of the perception, and more, of the United Kingdom since the vote on 23 June 2016.
As a number of Members have already said, we should not expect those people to be replaced by UK workers. The hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent referred to the 700 people on JSA in her constituency; clearly, if all 700 of them worked, they would not replace the 5,000 to 10,000 seasonal workers who come to work on the farms in the surrounding area. The hon. Member for Angus has confirmed that the picking season can last up to 10 months, so such workers are required for a substantial period. One farmer to whom I spoke said that he has always sought British workers for his farm. In six years, he had one apply but they lasted precisely two and a half weeks. We are not going to find people in the UK jobs market to replace everyone currently working in a seasonal capacity.
Where will the workers come from? As countries such as Romania and Bulgaria get stronger, and given that alternatives such as Spain and Germany are now more attractive to them because of the fall in the value of the pound, we need to look further afield. I do not agree that we need to look as far afield as Sri Lanka; the farmer I spoke to reckons that the additional cost for that might be three times that of bringing over someone from Ukraine. The farmers would have to bear that cost, which would make our industry less competitive. Indeed, that is already happening because the workers who are coming over now are older and less productive, which adds to costs and will presumably also lead in the longer term, if not immediately, to an increase in food prices.
The old SAW scheme allowed workers from Ukraine and elsewhere to come, and that is what farmers want to happen. They want the market to be open to the 40 million Ukrainians and to the Moldovans and the Russians. That scheme was tightly controlled; it did not mean that people came to the UK to work and then disappeared into the jobs market. They came here, worked hard, earned money and then they returned home, so there was no issue with people disappearing and working unofficially. That is what is being called for, and I believe that Poland is now providing visas to Ukrainians. Poland is benefiting from an influx of Ukrainians, and that is making its agricultural sector much more productive. Those workers in Poland earn the anything-but-princely sum of £20 a day—we would not want to replicate that here, but it demonstrates that Poland is accessing those workers who are contributing to its agriculture, while our agriculture is suffering.
The hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent highlighted some cases of produce that had not been picked, but on the whole I think that Kent has probably just about managed this year, and it is the coming season that will present the real challenge. Any scheme needs to be up and running now—it cannot start in the new financial year in April or some time towards the end of the year. The season lasts for 10 months, and those people are needed now, not in four or five months. Hon. Members will have heard the figures quoted by the NFU about a 12.5% shortfall in seasonal workers this year, and the situation is unlikely to improve over the next 12 months.
A number of Members have rightly pointed out that although, in the longer term, automation might provide part of the solution—it has done so in some industries—currently it cannot do that in the agriculture sector. It is not about saying that because we are using all this cheap labour we are not investing in equipment; the equipment to invest in does not yet exist, although it might be there in five years’ time for apple and plum picking.
Colin Clark
I have already declared an interest in that I own a carrot factory. There is enormous mechanisation in factories. The right hon. Gentleman is right in what he says about the picking of soft fruit, but picking top fruit now involves serious mechanisation, as does processing it. Having been in the industry, I know that the availability of relatively cheap labour stopped an enormous investment in mechanisation, but such mechanisation has now come down greatly in price. Does he agree that some of the issues regarding the availability of labour will encourage factories to mechanise? Many of these jobs are very repetitive and would be better mechanised.
Tom Brake
I agree with the hon. Gentleman and I am happy that he intervened. This must be a balance, and my understanding is that although currently a huge amount can be done with mechanisation in a packing environment, we are not yet there for apple and plum picking, and we may not be there for three, four or five years—who knows? There is a lot of talk about technological solutions being the answer to the border issue between Ireland and Northern Ireland—or, indeed, between Camden and Westminster—but in practice those blue sky solutions do not yet exist. I did hear someone suggesting that drones might be the solution to the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, so perhaps that is also the solution for picking apples and plums. Realistically, however, those technological solutions are not yet there.
What is the solution to this problem? Hon. Members will not be surprised to know that the Liberal Democrats will continue to campaign for a vote on the final deal, so that if people do not like what they are offered once an eventual deal is struck between the UK Government and the EU, they have a chance of pulling away from it and stopping Brexit. If that does not happen, what is the immediate solution to our problem? Clearly, it is to allow workers from EU and non-EU countries—increasingly, it will be non-EU countries—to come to the United Kingdom through controlled schemes that have worked effectively in the past. It will also be about supporting technology to ensure that investment goes into those areas where that can make a difference.
We also need a seasonal scheme. In the past I have heard senior Ministers say, “Oh, we can sort it all out by introducing six-month visas”, but that will not be sufficient. As we have heard, the season now lasts for 10 months, so the visas must be longer than the six months proposed. If all that can be implemented now—not at the end of the year and not next season—there is a realistic prospect that most of our farmers will be able to pick all their crops. If we do not act now, however, there is a real risk that reports towards the end of this year will be about a substantially greater proportion of fruit and veg left to rot in our fields.
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
It is just possible that our farmers will get through this year because freedom of movement is still available and farms have access to eastern European migrants who hopefully will come and do the work. Next year is when it all kicks in, because freedom of movement will end and the available sources of labour will go with it. At that point we will need innovative solutions to bring in seasonal labour so that the crops can be picked.
Tom Brake
I agree entirely, and there must be a sense of urgency about this. As I understand, however, yesterday the Government made a U-turn, and having said that March 2019 was the cut-off point for new arrivals, they will now allow people to continue to arrive during the transition period. If that is correct, that may help the industry for a further few years.