Home Secretary Suella Braverman might be in for a tough battle with Prime Minister Truss and Defra after saying she would clamp down on the UK’s reliance on seasonal workers. Ms Braverman’s comments came as part of her first address as Home Secretary to Conservative Party members at last week’s Tory conference. They were a marked contrast to those of PM Truss who, while campaigning for the party leadership this summer, pledged to enlarge the scheme.
Ms Braverman insisted that UK residents should be trained as fruit pickers in order to end the sector’s reliance on foreign labor. She stated that the UK’s ‘newfound’ freedom from the EU meant that the government should only allow migration that ‘grows our economy’.
She said: “The truth is parts of our system are not delivering. We need to end the abuse of the rules and cut down on those numbers that are not meeting the needs of our economy. And we must not forget how to do things for ourselves. There is absolutely no reason why we cannot train up enough of our own HGV drivers, butchers, or fruit-pickers.
“The way we will build a high-skilled and high-wage economy is by encouraging business to invest in capital and domestic labor . Not relying wholly on low skilled foreign workers,” she continued.
A recent survey by the NFU found that labor shortages have seen £22 million worth of fruit and vegetables wasted in the first half of 2022, with worst-case estimates putting the figure at around £60m.
Source: fpcfreshtalkdaily.co.uk
