Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to prevent agricultural products from rotting because of a lack of agricultural workers.

The Government recognises the importance of a reliable source of seasonal labour for crop picking and packing, and that it is a key part of bringing in the harvest for the horticultural sector.

On 24 December 2021, the Government announced that the seasonal worker visa route will be extended to 2024 to allow overseas workers to come to the UK for up to six months to harvest both edible and ornamental crops. This will provide a greater degree of certainty to the sector after a series of annual pilots between 2019 and 2021. An initial allocation of 30,000 visas was made available for 2022.

We have just announced in the Food Strategy that the Government will release an extra 10,000 visas for the Seasonal Worker visa route (bringing the total to 40,000 visas for 2022) with 8,000 of these going to the horticulture sector and 2,000 to the poultry sector. Further information on the operational details will be provided very soon.

We have also been working closely with the operators of the Seasonal Worker visa route to ensure that they can source potential workers in spite of the war in Ukraine. Operators are currently confident that they will be able to replace affected workers by recruiting from other countries.

The recently announced Food Strategy addresses the challenges faced by the food and farming sector, including a commitment to deliver an independent review to tackle labour shortages in the food supply chain, considering the roles of automation, domestic labour and migration routes.

Defra’s Review of Automation in Horticulture will also be published in early summer, to be followed by a formal Government response. Defra continues to work with other Government departments to ensure that opportunities for domestic recruitment are optimised.