Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps she has taken to help prevent the exploitation of workers on the Seasonal Worker Visa in food supply chains.

Protecting workers from exploitation is paramount in the design and operation of the Seasonal Worker route. The Home Office undertakes extensive assurance action across the route, including significant numbers of boots on the ground visits, including interviews with randomly selected workers. Since March 2023, we have visited 387 farms and conducted 2560 interviews of both farm managers and workers.

Defra’s Annual Seasonal Worker survey showed that the vast majority of respondents (94.2%) reported a positive experience from their time in the UK and 96.9% expressed a desire to return.

Scheme Operators are required to have a clear employer transfer pathway in place as a condition of holding their sponsor licence, including transparent criteria for making a transfer request and a process for considering such requests. This is set out in published Home Office guidance, available at: Workers and Temporary Workers: guidance for sponsors: sponsor a seasonal worker - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

We currently have five scheme operators for horticulture and poultry workers who are responsible for 43,000 employees. We carefully manage the allocation each operator receives to ensure that it is commensurate with their scale, capabilities and experience as a scheme operator. Allowing workers to move freely between operators is incompatible with this important safeguard as it could place individuals at greater risk of exploitation.

If a significant issue was identified with an individual employer, a Scheme Operator will promptly relocate any workers placed with that employer to a more appropriate farm. This can be done immediately with no need to for further visa applications or any interruption to the workers immigration status. The gives workers a safety net which explicitly ensures that they are not tied to their employer.