"Right now the situation is very grim, we have had the first big push on the strawberry harvest and we have just scraped through," explains John. "We have had to move people around to fill the gaps in labour supply at various growers, it has been very challenging."
The demand for labour in the fruit industry in the UK has been increasing 25% year on year, but figures from NFU this week state that the supply was down 17% in May this year.
The perfect storm
According to John the scene is set for the perfect storm as the second big wave strawberries approaches. The situation will worsen at the end of July when there are big raspberry and strawberry volumes which will clash with the start of the apple harvest. The UK fruit and vegetable industry needs seasonal labour from January right through to December.
He does not agree however that the wages are low in the UK's fruit sector, as workers can potentially earn between £9 - £15 per hour if they work very hard. Where the problem is, is the exchange rate which last year was £1.18 - 1.20 to the Euro and is now 1.30 to the Euro. When you consider that Eastern European workers go to the UK to work hard and save money for a few years before going home, this makes a huge dent in their savings and working in other European countries much more attractive.
Although there has been mention of a registration process for EU citizens living and working in the UK and a reciprocal agreement for Brits in Europe, this will not influence those here to work for the fruit season, as most of those people don't want to stay in the UK as it is too expensive. According to John they want to work for a few seasons and build a good financial foundation to move back home with.
"When the EU consisted of just 8 countries the labour supply was beginning to diminish, but Romania and Bulgaria were just about to be introduced to the EU, the UK Government ran a seasonal worker's scheme, SAWS, for workers from these two countries, counted them in, counted them out. It was a very efficient and cost effective scheme and good for immigration figures. Up until now the government has always had some kind of successional planning for labour supply, we have in the past recruited from outside the UK from Russia, Ukraine, Albania for example, but today there is no successional planning for temporary and seasonal workers. We are a year and a half away from Brexit, but we will start recruiting for the 2019 season at the end of next season which is 15 months from now. But the government has no scheme in place for seasonal workers and the Government agricultural minister has said very clearly that no scheme will be looked into until Brexit is definitely finalised, which is frankly just too late."
John said that by that time there will not be a softfruit industry in the UK! "We are on train where we just don't know where its going. Us and all the big softfruit producers have no idea where we are going to get our workers from for 2019, 2018 is already going to be a struggle. How can we go and recruit from countries where we don't even know if will have access to labour?"
Using UK workers
Recruiting from within the UK is not a solution either, John says this will just not stem the gap in the labour supply. "Anyone who thinks this is possible is just delusional. Firstly if you look at where the major points of unemployment are in the UK, cities such as Hull, Bradford, Glasgow, there is no fruit growing or seasonal veg around them. The places where we do need seasonal labour such as Kent, Evesham, Cornwall, have almost zero unemployment. How do you get 600 unemployed people to Cornwall in the first week of January? Where would we house them?
"At the moment the Eastern European workers are housed on the farms, but it would just not be feasable, even if we could get them to come, to integrate even a small number of UK nationals into a tight community of Romanians and Bulgarians. There is very little appetite in the UK labour pool to work in seasonal agriculture, because they are just not not 'hungry' enough for this type of work."
Solution
John said that they should be looking right now at a temporary seasonal agricultural workers scheme for countries outside the UK which can be fully regulated with countries such as the Ukraine, Serbia, Albania etc. Workers from further afield such as China, Cambodia, Vietnam and the such would just not work because of transport costs.
HOPS no longer has any workers from Latvia or Lithuania and in fact closed their Polish office a couple of years ago. As the Polish who came to the UK years ago were very aspirational and moved on from fruit picking to better jobs, many are now resident in the UK with jobs in hospitality, offices and banks.
This labour crisis is of course not just in agriculture, but through the whole processing industry, food service, hospitality, manufacturing, the NHS, care workers. There is big competition for the young, bright, enthusiastic, Eastern Europeans and these days they have pick of jobs and don't need work in the fruit industry any more.
Nevertheless John is positive about how they are still supplying labour to farms, "We still have people on the ground, we still have people picking crops, but we do have a shortage of people and we are working very hard to try to maintain our orders, however it is disappointing that there is no succession planning currently in place which the industry desperately needs."
It was mentioned in the Queen's speech that there would be an agriculture bill for Brexit, which according to John is positive, but it is not know yet if there is any reference to labour in that bill. "Even if a scheme was to be thought up right now, by the time it was implemented it would still be too late."
Could we see imported strawberries at Wimbledon?
There is enough fruit, but if there is no one to pick it it won't be on the shelves. Softfruit in particular must be picked as soon it is ripe and if a grower is 20% down on labour he will be 20% down on volume.
For more information:
John Hardman
HOPS
Tel: +44 (0)2476 698 000
Email: John.Hardman@hopsls.com
www.hopslaboursolutions.com